This small survey is a perfect marriage of artist and curator: Rocío García is a Cuban artist who paints pictures of bodies under duress, while Carmen Maria Machado is an American writer of Cuban descent who specializes in body horror. Both are closely attuned to uneven power dynamics, which may be one reason García and Machado thought to foreground the artist’s Los patinadores (The Skaters, 2023), in which a quartet of headless, nude men chained at the neck skates through a prison cell. García painted these chiseled men Day-Glo pink, lending them a homoeroticism that appears at odds with their forbidding cell. That we are meant to take pleasure in looking at their decapitated bodies only makes these pictures even more uneasy.
Bound figures recur across García’s paintings here, though it’s not always clear whether the conditions of their restraint are consensual, since the artist leaves us without information needed to make that assessment. The 2021 painting Lluvia azul (Blue Rain), for one, shows a nude woman placing flowers in a vase while, to her right, another woman lies on a bed, her feet cuffed together. Whether that second woman is the seated one’s paramour or her victim, or some strange combination of the two, is left ambiguous.
And sometimes, it’s not even clear whether García’s bodies even belong to human beings. In one painting, she portrays a man—once again one without clothes and a head—seated on a bare mattress, rifle in hand. His legs culminate not in feet but flower-like appendages. Might he represent a dehumanized authority figure, The Man personified? García leaves that ambiguous, too, lending this painting its charge.
Through September 20, at 26 Wooster Street.
