Lyles & King is pleased to present a new exhibition of paintings by Farley Aguilar. The show’s titled Haunted futures suggests a foregone conclusion, economic and environmental uncertainty yet to come.

The figures in Aguilar’s paintings engage in ceremony and costume; they stand in military formation or pose at a suburban masquerade party. Their faces are painted in a range of unnaturally vibrant and acidic colors, and their expressions range from blank to clownlike. Aguilar riffs on the history of painting: bringing forward the biting political commentary of Goya, the cartoony satire of Daumier, or a realistic portrayal of social class a la Courbet. He manages to obscure the specificities of his original source while developing the nameless figures into ghouls or jesters – the various tragedy and comedy on their faces suggest the looming dread, anxiety and perhaps gallows humor of our current predicament.

In these new works, Aguilar focuses on two sets of characters, one being children, who, in Aguilar’s estimation, are born into a hyper consumerist culture. He’s concerned with the way our children are exposed to commercial influences, smartphones and iPad screens – factors that feed a compulsive examination of one’s own image and its surface, and leads to ego-exhaustion. In one painting, Aguilar depicts the performance of self as a barefoot child teetering at an adult’s mirrored vanity. She gazes past a table of beauty products, a grin plastered to her face at the sight of her own reflection, which is distorted in mismatched Crayola hues as though to question the veracity of either image – is the mirror revealing a deeper truth or just deluding, distracting the child? In another painting Aguilar employs a similar treatment to a feminized figure painted pea soup green. She holds a red balloon and stares intensely, her visage tripled thanks to a funhouse-style, concave mirror that distorts everything around her.

Two paintings depict costume parties in suburban living rooms. Their attendees seem to be stand-ins for the wealthy elite; with hubris, they dress in viking hats, fur, and gold jewelry and pose with chalice or spear like they’re celebrating a victory. A central female figure has a scribbled up nude body, vaguely allegorical as she poses under tattered red and white stripes. Another scene positions the partygoers with masks over their faces, rag-tag bandits demented in their menace despite the bourgeois living room. The raw nature of these paintings – areas loosely painted with varying degrees of finish – proposes a kind of degradation to the image, as though the sun is bleaching it out or exposing unseemly truths to the light.

In the way Aguilar commandeers characters from historical records, he commits small acts of vandalism. He scrambles defining facial features using exaggerated color and mark, amplifies the unsettling details of his photographic sources and disrupts legibility in service of his own messaging – which is typically issued as a warning cry. He paints a giant crimson red flag merging into wild green and yellow marks that appear like a hazardous weather pattern suspended within a placid blue sky. All of this looms over a band of young white people – buglers in skirts and tunics stand in formation ahead a line of girls playing snare drum. It looks to be an ordinary rehearsal yet Aguilar heightens the fascistic details and potential calamity, keen to use color, line, metaphor and mood to illuminate the danger ahead.

(Text by Emily Davidson)

Farley Aguilar (b. 1980, Nicaragua) lives and works in Miami, FL. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York, NY; How Art Museum, Shanghai, CN; Edel Assanti, London, UK; SPURS Gallery, Beijing, CN; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, US; among others. Recent group exhibitions include Toward the celestial: ICA Miami’s collection at 10 years, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida, US; South Florida cultural consortium, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami, US; Recent acquisitions, Akron Art Museum, Akron, US; A very anxious feeling: voices of unrest in the American Experience; 20 years of the Beth Rudin DeWoody collection, The Taubman Museum, Roanoke, US; This is America, Kunstraum Potsdam, Potsdam, DE; Fragmented Bodies, Albertz Benda, New York, US; On the road II, curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah, Oolite Arts, Miami, US; Shifting gaze: a reconstruction of the black and hispanic body in contemporary art, The Mennello Museum, Orlando, US; and We are the people. Who are you?, Edel Assanti, London, UK. His work is in the collections of the Bass Museum, Miami, US; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL; Pérez Art Museum Miami, US; Brown University, Providence, US; Akron Art Museum, Akron, US; Orlando Museum of Art; Aurora Museum, Shanghai, CN; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, CN; Dangxia Art Space, Beijing, CN; Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Suzhou, CN; and Zhuzhong Art Museum, Beijing, CN; among others.