Voids and Thresholds
Sargent’s Daughters Viewing Room
Tribeca, NYC.
05.09.25 - 06.07.25
Sargent's Daughters is pleased to present Voids and thresholds, the New York solo debut of Mexican-born, Atlanta-based artist Sergio Suárez. In a practice that encompasses woodblock carvings and prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures, Suárez creates resonant allegories of metaphysical forces. Drawing equally upon Mesoamerican cosmologies and contemporary astrophysics, his work reframes concepts of temporality, translation, and syncretism.
Suárez’s practice is grounded in the tradition of wood-block printmaking, one of the most ancient techniques for reproducing an image. Often working on a monumental scale, Suárez carves directly into the wood panel, producing scenes that balance dense mark-making with unbounded forms. His compositions draw from diverse sources, including Precolombian mythologies, Catholic altarpieces, and modern images of deep space.
After carving a panel, Suarez creates a print on muslin and the black-and-white image serves as the substrate for his vibrant paintings. Using oil, charcoal, aerosol, and chalk pastel, Suárez adds layers of color and resonance to his work, conjuring bodies that seem to glow from within. Woven together into enigmatic tableaux, Suárez’s figures enact rituals of creation and destruction, emerging from pools of water, dipping their fingers into divine fire, and offering orbs that seem to contain other universes within themselves. The exhibition’s title, Voids and thresholds, evokes the spaces these fragmented bodies inhabit – the limitless complexity and potential of the cosmic void and the liminal spaces that connect them to the physical world.
The wood carving and paintings exist in dialogue with Suárez’s talismanic sculptures. Cast aluminum, textile, ceramics, and stone both operate as extensions of the forms in the paintings and as speculative archeologies of the scenes depicted. For the artist, the constellations of materials and symbols in his work evoke the birth of language and the cosmos itself.
Suárez’s practice is grounded in the tradition of wood-block printmaking, one of the most ancient techniques for reproducing an image. Often working on a monumental scale, Suárez carves directly into the wood panel, producing scenes that balance dense mark-making with unbounded forms. His compositions draw from diverse sources, including Precolombian mythologies, Catholic altarpieces, and modern images of deep space.
After carving a panel, Suarez creates a print on muslin and the black-and-white image serves as the substrate for his vibrant paintings. Using oil, charcoal, aerosol, and chalk pastel, Suárez adds layers of color and resonance to his work, conjuring bodies that seem to glow from within. Woven together into enigmatic tableaux, Suárez’s figures enact rituals of creation and destruction, emerging from pools of water, dipping their fingers into divine fire, and offering orbs that seem to contain other universes within themselves. The exhibition’s title, Voids and thresholds, evokes the spaces these fragmented bodies inhabit – the limitless complexity and potential of the cosmic void and the liminal spaces that connect them to the physical world.
The wood carving and paintings exist in dialogue with Suárez’s talismanic sculptures. Cast aluminum, textile, ceramics, and stone both operate as extensions of the forms in the paintings and as speculative archeologies of the scenes depicted. For the artist, the constellations of materials and symbols in his work evoke the birth of language and the cosmos itself.