For his first solo exhibition at Company Gallery, Sergio Miguel presents Balada de la inquisición (Inquisition ballad), a series of new paintings that transcend traditional figuration in a provocative interplay between beauty and monstrosity.

This exhibition represents a big leap in the artist’s trajectory. The origin point of Miguel’s body of work lies in the tension between historical allusion and contemporary critique. Probing deeply into historical legacies of oppression, specifically in the Spanish colonial experience, Miguel was originally drawn to the infamous pinturas de casta, a century-long genre that pictorially diagrammed miscegenation in the New World by representing colonial subjects and highlighting their varying differences from idealized Spanishness. Miguel found in these paintings models to play with and abstractions to blend into an emancipatory portrayal of contemporary subjects who continue to be marginalized.

This project took shape in works displayed previously at Company, as part of the group exhibition, De por vida (2021), and then later in his solo show at Deli Gallery, Army of angels (2022) which, moving from the Viceroyalty of New Spain to that of Peru, offered a surprising take on the 17th-century genre of arquebusier angels —Andean noblemen depicted as militant yet saintly figures. By transforming the angels into devious, divine women, Miguel injected a subversive femininity into classical Renaissance archetypes, thereby challenging the visual codes of religious art. In Balada de la inquisición, Miguels’s interest in this symbolism evolves further, with neo-medieval beasts, Baconian grotesques, and Goya-esque eccentricities populating compositions that blend the familiar with the fantastical. The paintings traverse beyond identity, adopting an instinctual style that explores themes of isolation, transformation, and the visceral dimensions of nature and subjecthood.

Each scene on view contributes to an intricate tapestry of hyper-detailed beasts and young men that haunt and mesmerize in equal measure. Miguels’ figures, ambiguous and unsettling, engage the viewer with vacant or knowing stares that question who is the observer and who is the observed. Resisting clear categorization, they verge on the feral, posed tensely on the cusp of transformation, as if teetering between submission and rebellion. Set against stark, decaying industrial environments, these figures resonate with a sense of dystopian abandonment, amplifying the rawness of their primal expressions.

Alongside, Miguel introduces sinewy, otherworldly creatures—beings that straddle the line between human and animal and embody both allure and dread. These hybrid forms evoke a dark familiarity, as though emerging from an ancient subconscious. In shadowy, desolate backdrops, they linger timelessly, suspended in an enigmatic state that defies resolution. The result is a hauntingly enveloping exhibition that urges its viewers to confront both the grotesque and the sublime within the liminal spaces of history, identity, and the unknown.

Sergio Miguel received his B.A. in Art History in 2014 and his M.F.A. in Studio Art from Columbia University in 2021. Solo exhibitions include Balada de la Inquisición at Company Gallery in 2024 and Army of Angels at Deli Gallery in 2022. Sergio Miguel lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.