Anna Calleja, Jorge K. Cruz, Onur Gökmen, Igor Moritz, Grace Rosario Perkins, Elsa Rensaa

October 21—November 25, 2023
Reception: Thursday, November 2, 6-8pm

James Fuentes
55 Delancey Street
New York, NY 10002

Breakthrough introduces six artists: Anna Calleja, Jorge K. Cruz, Onur Gökmen, Igor Moritz, Grace Rosario Perkins, and Elsa Rensaa. This group exhibition formalizes a creative process that is influenced by the transformative mindset of each artist and materializes the unconscious as art. The work of these artists tends to look inward, offering a glimpse of personal, everyday moments, domestic and studio scenes, as well as the interiors of emotional and spiritual life. These images and objects are both recognizable and strange, wrought by creative forces made visible through form and content. Herein, the unconscious serves as a kind of invisible layer, producing a binding substance between image and expression within each artwork.

There is an openness of process that carries throughout this group of works that can be read as both a sensuality and sensibility. For each artist, the studio offers a place to foster freedom, experimentation, contemplation, and action—all of which continually transform and steadily materialize in the process of the making of the work. If all that exists in our world consists of either energy or matter, as viewers we connect with these objects in a (hyper-)sensual moment, in which what we see and feel is a presence of the unconscious as it arrives into the artwork, without itself taking on explicit forms. This encounter with the resulting work thus marks the moment of its full manifestation.

Here, in its extrinsic substance—color, line, icon, image, reference, signifier, abstraction, and so on—each work now points to the existence of itself and what lies beyond. Forming this new relation independent of its maker, the creative force culminates in an organism of permanent autonomy with which we come to meet. The breakthrough, therefore, occurs not only as the work crystallizes but also in its reception, detaching from the privacy of its making and made public through its exhibition. Established in its neutrality yet always in relation, the work connects and revolves through past and future timelines, between first- and third-person narration, from one emotional body to another, in a space of confidence and belief.

James Fuentes would like to thank the artists for the creative dialogues that led to the exhibition in close conversation with collaborators Todd Bockley, Christopher Y. Lew, Lundgren Gallery, Daniel Malarkey, Clayton Patterson, and Gryphon Rue.

Organized by Katrin Lewinsky.