Carnage Compositions

Grave Robber Manifestation

It begins with an ending. Misfortune was the genesis for the central sculpture in this exhibition. A pile of
fear and failure and a broken heart kindled the question of what to do with the remains. Rather than
yield to fate, Raúl leaned into the symbolic moment and resurrected the misfortune. “The Deaths of Every
Day” performs its own self-destruction and tries to transform despair into destiny. Impaled and uplifted
by an armature of steel beams, the figure is liberated by its undoing. It reminds me of Titian’s “Flaying of
Marsyas”, a body picked at by flies, dying away, a body ruined in order to free the soul. Little beads and
bits of shitty thrift store sequins shine with renewed secrecy. The sculpture’s dressed in elevated death
drag.

Universal Earthly Delights

Its changing room is a series of wardrobe doors entitled “The Book of Hours”. On their insides, a
menagerie of leering figures take turns dancing with death. No one leads. Even the skeletons throw their
stupid hands in the air, engaged in a ritual but clueless as to which myth they enact. Raúl says “Celebration is a system of belief,” and amid the earthly delights, the ripe corn stalks and ribbetting frogs, he has
painted a portal that thrums with the white noise of the great void. It’s a passageway to the moon, which
is represented on the other side of the doors in low relief, entombed in a shallow grave of cratered gesso.
Over an abstract topography Raúl maps rhythm onto chaos.

Duplicate Magic

A fabulous little astronaut named Timothy stands outside these doors and he’s just a kid, but naiveté has
prepared him for everything. Though he hasn’t outgrown his dolls, Timothy’s readymade boyish features
are steeled in anticipation, an allegory of creative exploration. In the adjacent room, an old witch-doctor
named Lord gazes on without judgment, but without empathy, also an allegory of creative exploration.
Some of the other figures stand on thin sheets of slate rock, like pages taken from a book of earth, a book,
incidentally about the moon; seen and not felt, known and not understood.

11th Hour Gratitude

Flies - 1100 flies - are landing on everything. I read that blowflies lay living larvae in rotting bodies. They
celebrate life by helping things die.

Text by Ambera Wellman
Company Gallery