Surfacing: Curated by: Carlos Rosales-Silva

Ruiz-Healy Art is delighted to present Surfacing, curated by Carlos Rosales-Silva, at our New York City gallery featuring works by Ricardo Cabret, Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Nora Maité Nieves, Edward Salas, and Eric Santoscoy-McKillip.

"One of our collective losses in the last year has been the ability to freely touch a public surface, specifically a painted surface. In New York City there are surfaces that have been painted and repainted for decades on end. Steel lies so thick with paint that it almost feels soft to the touch. 

"As artists we get to touch the artwork. We touch the surfaces of our own works without regard for the oils in our fingertips seeping into them, our residues becoming a part of the texture of the art. We learn to see our work by touching materials, learning how they will sit on a surface and how they will fit together. The best formalism of texture comes loaded with context.  For the artists in Surfacing textural depth carries the specificity of emotion, memory, place, vernacular culture, architecture, and the digital transaction of information. We are drawn to textural works because they activate our field of vision and our sense of touch. The artists that make these works are inviting us to feel something." - Carlos Rosales-Silva

Ricardo Cabret is a Puerto Rican artist and scientist working between computer science, code, and painting. Over the past decade, Cabret has worked as a creative coder while maintaining a daily painting and new media practice. Cabret has worked on projects such as blockchain for artist equity, encryption, and machine learning growth. His paintings explore these formal technological processes through abstraction, using landscapes and personal memory as a starting point and reference for his layered compositions.

Nora Maité Nieves lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She explores ideas about the sense of belonging in the spaces we inhabit. Her paintings, drawings, and sculptures make references to ornamental details from architecture, especially to floors, wall textures, tiles, doors, and more. The artist states, "Most of my references come from memories and using my spatial memory, like how you remember a space or place by walking around it in your mind. The whole map shifts. It connects space with events and emotions. Dimensions and scales get shifted; it becomes like fiction. I have decided to embrace that about memory and deliberately create new floor plans of rooms and architectural ornaments that are not quite real, forming collages that you can navigate visually." ("We Are More: Nora Maité Nieves Interviewed by Margaux Ogden," BOMB Magazine, 2019.)

Edward Salas is a Colombian American artist exploring the complexities of American identity through painting, ceramics, and other media. By manipulating popular American icons, idols, and archetypes, Salas investigates notions of taste while blurring the boundaries between fine art and craft. His work poses alternative narratives that complicate and reimagine tropes while questioning the idea of an authentic cultural object.

Eric Santoscoy-McKillip is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Moving between painting and sculpture, his work is an examination of place and identity through the use of color, symbols, space, and textures by reclaiming what has already been reclaimed. The transitions between these elements shift, overlap, and blur to reflect the physical and mental in-between space of the US-Mexico borderland, the continually changing complex identities and histories of his own and of the geographic region.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez is an abstract painter living and working in New York City. Stacking, conceptually and visually, is important to her work. The stacking of colors in a gradient. The stacking of kinds of forms or lines on top of each other. Stacking forces elements to be read as distinct and layered. Collins-Fernandez uses materials and surfaces to intertwine and form a unique language of words, color, gesture, and scale. The artist states, "I can’t help but see words as language, gesture as language, color as language, scale as language, all devoid of inherent authority. But I want for forms and concepts to touch. I’m working toward an emotional center in the work which is its quality of touch and the density of what is entwined or stacked."