Yanira Collado | Federico Villarino

September 10 - October 16, 2021

Yanira Collado is an artist that reaches into the past in order to narrate a more inclusive history, one that includes the people that endured the most sacrifice. As a child, Collado traveled between social structures: from Brooklyn, where she was born; to the Dominican Republic; to Miami, where her mother worked to become a tailor. Her two-dimensional pieces bring together poetic nuances of pattern, material, geometry, and time, her unrefined edges telling us that our collective histories have always been there, even before discovery. 

Her textured collages incorporate geometric forms that allude to the triangulation of her childhood, the language of textile arts of the displaced African slaves, and the Caribbean diaspora. As Yanira describes. “My work attempts to assemble a visual language that reconciles the process in which the history of this information is recorded, stored, and retrieved. I am interested in the labor inherent in these materials and the shapes taken during their transitions, which conjure up invocations, ritual, a transcendence of presence, and in many ways, fragments becoming whole.”

Federico Villarino is an artist that plays with the instability of the reproduced image, working with imagined landscapes often inspired by other artworks, sacred geometry, even occult symbology. Villarino’s paintings are vividly colored, often depicting large, sweeping botanicals in an indeterminate light. These gestures are “interrupted” by their jagged, painted edge, offering a pixelated take on the unnatural natural. Never populated, the artist suggests that his viewer offer the narrative point to his paintings as the person that engages and interacts with his imagined landscapes.

Working from a modified computer image, the artist bends and manipulates images until they become something several versions away from what they were, but are stilled from the never-ending flux of what they can become. “When I imagine a new painting I paint small oils in a small format, I select one, scan it, edit it on the computer changing proportions, inverting colors or breaking its formal structure. What I bring to the canvas with the projector is an image that went through various states. Finally, painting the picture is to capture a particular moment of that fluctuating path.”

Yanira Collado (b. 1975, Brooklyn, NY) lives and works in Miami FL. Her artist residency fellowships include Bridge Red Art Center, North Miami, FL (2013-present), Project Row Houses, Houston, TX (2018), Oolite Arts, Miami Beach, FL (2019 – present), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation residency in New Orleans, LA (2020). She was awarded an Ellie Creator Grant from Oolite in 2019, first place in the 2013 South Florida Biennial at the Art and Cultural Center/Hollywood, FL and was named a Joan Mitchell Foundation fellow in 2018. Most recently, her work was featured in Estamos Bien La Trienal at El Museo Del Barrio.

Federico Villarino (b. 1978, Buenos Aires) studied painting at the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón (now UNA) and was the winner of a First Prize at Faena Art Award in 2006, his work has since been shown in galleries throughout Argentina. In 2013 he was invited to an art residency in Pouch Cove Foundation in Canada and was participant of the residency program of Santa Rosa Factoria in Chile. Federico Villarino lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.