Cielo Félix-Hernández | sweet and sour

November 4 – December 21, 2023

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present Cielo Félix-Hernández’s solo exhibition sweet and sour, the artist’s Los Angeles debut and her second presentation with the gallery. Featuring an entirely new body of work, sweet and sour continues Félix-Hernández’s exploration of her individual, familial, and cultural experiences of transition and transformation. Her saturated and atmospheric oil paintings depict moments of rest, care, and cultivation as antidotes to violence and repression.

Across the exhibition, solitary, iconic femme figures examine their own reflections in spaces of repose. Often surrounded by water or vegetation, they stride or recline, apparently in moments of private contemplation. Discussing this content in her work, the artist considers the multiplicity of impressions that she strives to capture; “In moments of care and discovery, the intersections of a street where both fear and excitement of seeing a familiar face, across the street, seeing your childhood home change, across an ocean, a home becoming rubble, and its concrete form being reused to remold an alternative home, leaving you displaced, alternatively searching, replanting seeds, sitting under the pouring rain, becoming a puddle.” Like a calm sea in the eye of a storm, Félix-Hernández’s figures depict moments of pause within bodies and landscapes that are eternally in flux.

The palette of the works recalls citrus fruits and ripe plantains, as the bright pinks, greens, and yellows seem to overflow the boundaries of the canvas. Some works in the exhibition do this literally, with satin fringe, hand-tied by the artist, extending compositions beyond their supports. These juicy colors and adornments pay direct homage to the artist’s familial home of Puerto Rico, the metaphysical setting of much of her work. Though bright, each individual piece appears nearly monochromatic, like photographs that have faded in direct sunlight, echoing the effect of memory on the images. In this way, sweet and sour filters the complexities of Félix-Hernández’s personal and communal experience into distilled moments of bittersweetness, producing a respite for both artist and viewer.

Cielo Félix-Hernández (b.1998, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico) is a Puerto-Rican transdisciplinary artist, living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Working primarily in oil paint, Félix-Hernández depicts figures who author their own narratives, constructed out of familiar Boricua and Caribbean iconographies.

Félix-Hernández received her BFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. Recent group exhibitions include Puerto Rico Negrx, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Puerto Rico (San Juan, Puerto Rico), “Pictures Girls Make:” Portraitures, curated by Alison M. Gingeras, Blum & Poe, (Los Angeles, CA), Death of Beauty, Sargent’s Daughters (Los Angeles, CA), DOMESTICANX, curated by Susanna Temkin, El Museo del Barrio (New York, NY), Ojos del Perro Azul, Marinaro (New York, NY), Nine Lives, Fortnight Institute (New York, NY), Visions and Nightmares, Simone Subal Gallery, curated by Baseera Khan (New York, NY), Flame Tree, REGULARNORMAL, curated by Bony Ramirez (New York, NY), documento, Embajada (San Juan, Puerto Rico), My Flannel Knickers, Sargent's Daughters (New York, NY), Dynasty, curated by Amy Goldrich, Christopher K. Ho, Omar Lopez-Chahoud, and Sara Reisman, PS122 Gallery (New York, NY). She had her first New York solo exhibition nieta at Sargent’s Daughters in January 2022, which was reviewed by Artnet, Artsy and Platform Art. Félix-Hernández is in the permanent collection at El Museo del Barrio (New York, NY). Sargent’s Daughters presented a solo booth of new works by Félix-Hernández at NADA Miami 2022. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Abrons Art Center, New York, NY. She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters.

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