ALEJANDRO CARDENAS

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 watercolour, 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.