Ricardo Cabret

Selected works

Un Nuevo Manglar
May 6 - June 17, 2023

Kohn Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of New York-based, Puerto Rican artist Ricardo Cabret. In his first solo show with the gallery, Cabret debuts Un Nuevo Manglar, an all-new body of work consisting of several paintings and an immersive generative artwork.

As an artist and computer engineer, Cabret allows the two spheres of practice to inform each other. He moves seamlessly between paint and code; transforming grids through layers of gel polymers, acrylic paint, and oil pastels, while depicting encrypted language with bursts of colors. In line with generative art predecessor, John Whitney and influenced by Charles Gaines’ Gridworks, Cabret describes his seminal Guión Criptográfico 3.0, as an access point to the primary principles of his practice. Conceived almost two years prior, the digital work adorns the gallery wall with a projection of three variables–color, pattern, and shape, together revealing an immersive and indefinite, moving image.

Cabret’s translucent grids and colored forms divert from a true vantage point and, rather, present a mathematical perspective. The gel-polymer planes indicate an invisible interconnected system, layered over the natural world represented by cool-toned pastels. This aesthetic vocabulary percolates throughout the work with muted compositions of diverse landscapes in Puerto Rico, and small-scale studies of material application.  The vivid brushstrokes and organic lines recall Joan Mitchell’s action paintings and Zilia Sánchez’s use of color and form. His application of elegant, softer tones —sometimes derived from oxidized purple hues—render memories of island sun glare creating a subdued effect throughout the terrain.

The artist is intrigued by the technological infrastructures embedded in the landscapes of Puerto Rico and, by extension, the world—as well as their environmental, cultural, and fiscal repercussions–revealing the entanglement between human and machine, body and land. Cabret’s paintings archive and make visible technological structures and networks that have become blueprints for exploitative development. Reflecting the intricate root systems of the mangrove, these works play with new languages of abstraction that hover between the canvas and the digital.