SUMMER SUMMER is a group exhibition focused on abstract figuration within three distinctive Caribbean practices. The exhibiting artists are Leonardo Benzant (Dominican-American), Ronald Cyrille (Guadeloupe), and Steven Schmid (The Bahamas). SUMMER SUMMER focuses on the artists’ unfettered yet encompassed figurative approach in their respective mediums. The exhibition will be on view from July 25th to August 25th, 2024, with an opening reception on July 25th from 6 pm to 8 pm.
Ranging from collage to painting to mixed media works on handmade paper, this exhibition highlights how each artist funnels their experiences with identity, spirituality, and the landscape into two-dimensional renderings of their worlds. Bahamian artist Steven Schmid is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice utilizes drawing, painting, and collage to explore themes of nostalgia, masculinity, and otherness. Through abstract figuration, Schmid creates self-portraits and portraits of his family members by sampling textures, photographs, and images of past works to create an overall aesthetic of the complexities of masculinity on handmade paper.
The urban shaman Leonardo Benzant uses his practice to “bridge the spiritual and the material realities of the African diaspora.” Using soft pastels and acrylic on paper, Benzant conjures images of portraits and bodies repeated in motion. His colorful mark-making energizes the picture plane and pulses electrically between the foreground and background. Benzant invites the viewer to witness the culmination of responses and promptings in these paintings that stem from his belief that African spirituality can be a tool of resistance.
Hailing from the southern Caribbean, Ronald Cyrille is a visual artist and muralist who combines anthropomorphic figures, the Caribbean landscape, and animals from his bestiary into paintings and collages. Cyrille’s grotesque yet beautiful paintings and paper collages push the viewer into the surreal realities of his compositions. The simplicity of island life is made complex through Cyrille’s animation of each element into a whimsical monstrous being. Here, the sun has teeth and smiles, and the island is a creature within itself.
SUMMER SUMMER brings together three practices amid our summer to highlight the various roots of abstract figuration and surrealism. The purpose of distortion is to allow us to view the ordinary in un-ordinary ways and to be comfortable with complexity. Abstraction and surrealism enable us to see the world from different perspectives and settle in differences.
I Think This Is It (2023) by Steven Schmid
Epistolary For The Dreamers And Creators (2024) by Leonardo Benzant
By The Hills (2021) by Ronald Cyrille
Ronald Cyrille
Ronald Cyrille (b. 1984, Guadeloupe) is a visual artist and muralist. His approach combines reliefs, Caribbean landscapes, and animals from his bestiary. His characters are sometimes two-headed, sometimes with disproportionate limbs or composed of tree branches, leaves, or attributes of animals living in the Caribbean basin.
Leonardo Benzant
Leonardo Benzant (b. 1972, New York) is an artist who bridges the spiritual and the material realities of the African diaspora. He is most known for his expressive painting and elaborate beaded sculptures in his multidisciplinary practice.
Steven Schmid
Steven Schmid (b. 1987, Nassau, The Bahamas) is a Bahamian interdisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of masculinity and otherness through painting, collage and assemblage. Adopting Hip-Hop production and sampling as a visual practice, Schmid’s current research explores how laughter, humour and play can imagine more expansive representations of Bahamian masculinity and individualism.