Anat Ebgi is proud to announce Calusa Garden, the first solo exhibition by Alejandro Cardenas to be presented in Los Angeles. The exhibition will be on view at AE2 from June 8 – July 13. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, June 8 from 5-7pm.
The title Calusa Garden refers to a park on the island of Key Biscayne in Miami, where Cardenas grew up, and his memory of this park as an untamed mangrove wilderness—significant for both its unknowable past and its limitless paradisiacal potential. His newest suite of paintings takes pleasure in exploring such unknown dimensions, historic and prophetic.
Cardenas’s work depicts fluid and graphic characters populating verdant landscapes and dream-like interiors. Humanoid, at times monstrous subjects shapeshift, sublimate, and pose in various states of fluctuating energy—lounging on furniture, performing acrobatics, embracing one another.
Cardenas pays special attention to tangential lines, repeated angles, and tessellations of each evocative figure, producing iconic—almost hieroglyphic scenes. The artist grounds these figures within the impressionistic depth of his compositions, but by contrast, their silhouettes are bound in flat space, filled with undulating patterns, or an inky blackness.
The mysterious world depicted is simultaneously organic and cosmic, built up with layers of watercolor, gouache, and acrylic, heightening the sense of hybridity. Along with surrealist painters such as Max Ernst, Wilfredo Lam and Roberto Matta, Cardenas shares the desire to look inward—to collect drips of subconscious leaking through the cracks of dreams—collapsing past and future, flatness and dimensionality.
Alejandro Cardenas (b. 1977, Santiago, Chile) completed his BFA at the Cooper Union School of Art in 2000. Cardenas has exhibited his work in group and solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), James Fuentes (New York), Daniel Reich Gallery (New York), Rivington Arms (New York) and Marc Foxx (Los Angeles). Reviews of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, and Dossier Journal. Cardenas lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
