Rosario Zorraquín

Over the past decade, Rosario Zorraquin has engaged in a pursuit of ‘other-siders’. She has done so through a simple act: sifting. Such articulations come to be figured through Zorraquin’s experiments with cheesecloth, which she wraps around bodies, submerges in water, and marks with pencil, ink, paint, and water. While most literally enacting a filter, figuratively, she approaches each run of muslin as the site from where bodies take form; skin––a border of perpetual transformation. For its part, this can be experienced through the artist’s distinctive use of layering, with every choque (‘collision’) or confluence between elements producing new meaning, and alternative readings.

Ocelli draws imagery and ideas from shamanism, magic, and psychoanalysis. These new paintings are born from sessions created in the artist’s studio, where Zorraquin invited individuals to take part in ritual-like readings. Reliefs made from “Glosario,” the artist’s invented language of symbols, were used as a reading device to engage with a variety of emotional reactions in order to produce images in the subjects’ minds.

Figures appear to float and overflow as if they cannot adhere to the limits in which they exist. They dissipate through these unbounded circles, both rising and falling ubiquitously, reminding us of nightmares and hallucinations, light and heat that streams from luminous creatures. In the life-size figures, the feet point downward, giving us a sensation of elevation or suspension in a lacuna. Yet the arms appear bound, flattened onto itself, and while only a residue of the individual’s likeness can be traced, the figure, once floating, appears to be laid down as if the participant’s original absorption is still in session.

The marks in this new series come from an investigation with participants between 2020-2022 and constitute the first exhibition of Rosario Zorraquin in New York.