Rinella Alfonso

About

PAUL SOTO is pleased to announce the inaugural opening of our New York gallery with a new body of work by the Curaçaoan artist Rinella Alfonso (b. 1995). This is the artist’s first time exhibiting in New York, and her fifth collaboration with the gallery. The exhibition will open on Wednesday, October 25 at 121 W. 27th Street, 7th Floor, with a public reception from 6 to 8pm. Alfonso’s exhibition will run through Saturday, November 25.

Rinella Alfonso paints from memory and from a visual archive that she has collected over the years that reflect her domestic environment, familial relationships, and the intersections of virtual and social landscapes. She oftentimes paints castoff objects that she has catalogued from her childhood growing up in Curaçao. Among them in this exhibition are a pair of sandals, a warped iron fence, barbed wire, a fly, a rotting cushion, a beaded curtain, a pile of bones, mosquito nets, a broken table, hair bows, braided hair, a greenhouse, and a grouping of combs.

Alfonso animates her subject matter through an expressive approach that combines material heft and gestural exactitude. Hazes of color, mark-making, and pure light simultaneously contain and burn up her imagery. Objects come into view and recede back into deep painterly grounds. Concentrated white shapes beam outward, fracturing into translucent ripples and veils that envelop her compositions. Corrupted and abstract versions of her personal memories reconstitute themselves as a result. In the process an utterly new and unique Afro-Caribbean iconography begins to emerge. She ultimately redefines what is vital and paintable, and whose memories and experiences have importance as a subject.