LnS Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Zona Maco 2022, where we will present La huella del hombre (The Imprint of Man), a bilateral presentation of works by represented artists Gustavo Acosta and Tony Vazquez-Figueroa, showcasing the deeply personal investigations of each artist during the COVID-19 pandemic. While Acosta’s purely acrylic practice stands relative to Vazquez-Figueroa’s mixed media and multidisciplinary works, both artists converse on the lasting influence that their surrounding environment forced upon them during isolation. Both work on analyzing the symbolic and literal craters that the pandemic’s living conditions and long entrenched nature have created within their respective lives and communities.

For Acosta, the timely body of acrylic on canvas paintings featured in the presentation reflect the fragmented realities experienced throughout a unique moment in human history. He uses his iconic style of vibrant, profound imagery of urban settings, at times intervened by a human presence or besieged by unruly nature, in conjuring intense moods in a reflection of lived realities. Recognizable structures from the cities in which he has lived and visited: from Havana and Mexico City to Madrid, New York and Miami, become the concrete formations within each composition that read as both beautiful, and sometimes disturbing. Acosta describes his work as, “an investigation into the human condition, utilizing as testimony not the individual, but the individual’s creative footprint.” Inspired by everything from American realism, architecture, and action painting, his interpretation of architecture as an emblem of power explores the social and political aspects that buildings represent.

For Vazquez-Figueroa, the immersive collection of paintings, photography, and sculptures speak on the artist’s interpretation of the worldwide impact of the petroleum industry. With international training at the forefront of his process, Vazquez-Figueroa’s investigation into how oil-rich countries create unique physical environments, like oil refineries, and peculiar socio-economic and cultural environments led to the formation of Petropias, a term coined by the artist. The adapted Petropias, plays on the petrostate, revolving around the idea of holes, refineries, and containers that are revealed structurally and metaphorically through methodologies that are innovative and challenging exemplifications of craftsmanship, artistry, and science. In culmination, Vazquez-Figueroa declares, “I lived in a Petropia (Venezuela) and I learned to love it and understand it with its enormous defects and my enormous voids. I was ‘thrown into a world,’ into a Petropia, and found my way around it, escaping some of the terrible ideas that were imposed upon me.”