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Sergio Suárez | Rituals of Persistence | 13 sep – 1 Nov, 2025

“The abyss of time,” is how James Hutton described his realization, in the late 18th century, that Earth was archaically old. Hutton, a Scotsman, recognized that the layers of sedimentation he could perceive in the windswept cliffs of his homeland were in fact markers of a phenomenon he could see every day: the erosion of the tide upon the beach. The tide, a force in constant, shifting movement—much like the forces of tradition and change in human society— left a fixed trace on the physical world.Meanwhile, the fixity of matter, in the manner in which humans experience it daily as materiality itself, was revealed to Hutton as the subject of constant and inexorable change.

This tension between what is fluid and what is fixed, and what is traditional and what is new, also animates the forms of Sergio Suárez’s work. At first glance, there seem to be no settled forms. Neoclassical human figures might just as well be cyborgs. Minimalist objects arranged below panels might hearken to offerings before altarpieces. Their strange atemporality is achieved, not through the means of abstraction, but the fixity of form.

Each scene, carved in woodblocks, is first printed fully in black. If the eye is accustomed to pattern and contour to help us perceive volume and space, Suárez uses the unbroken color field to deliberately hijack some of the instinctual and unconscious aspects of how it is we see. Volumes that should be whole, are fractured; surfaces, abstracted; features, erased. These visual slippages in the two-tone scenes are reminders of the constructed nature of human vision in the brain, where the visual cortex processes stimuli almost synchronously to their sensorial perception in the retina, filling-in and coloring-in the sights of daily life.

Standing before each striking, black scene, it becomes impossible not to imagine oneself looking up at the night sky, illuminated by starlight. Dots and lines hint at the idea of constellations, but it is in fact the smaller, colored studies which take up the idea of the cosmic more fully. Suárez creates these by printing the full scene a second time, then cutting out vignettes from the canvas. Stretched across a frame, the images in ink become outlines on which to dream up the same scene in branching universes, with color becoming a tool to imagine how radiation on the invisible spectrum might appear in an alternate world. Looking between the full scene and its colored studies creates the sensation of traveling through porhrough portals across time and space.

Rituals of persistence displays Suárez ability in depicting time—the long, deep stretches of it—through indelible gestures on wood and the immediate sweep of a brush. For, at their heart, these are works that demonstrate not only how the figurative may be harnessed to pursue ideas about material and spiritual ambiguity, but the possibilities of visual speculation on entanglement.

— Mari Carmen Barrios Giordano

Sergio Suárez’s woodcuts construct scenes that exist at the periphery of visibility — a space in which cosmic interconnectivity fuses with quotidian experiences of the ineffable. Suárez describes his woodblock printing practice as “composing in time”, and it is as if each work contains an internal mythology, to which the viewer is privy to a single moment in an unknown, prolonged chronology. Every scene feels temporally in flux, existing as stamps from an ambiguous epoch, amplified by the weaving of mixed iconographies like Mesoamerican cosmologies, catholic theological painting, contemporary telescopic observations, and western metaphysical philosophy, and Western metaphysical philosophy. These works contain an intricate balance of pressure and lightness, thematically with the omission of sunlight, and physically with the necessary force to make the marks in the wood for printing. Like a blurred mass passing beneath a streetlamp, these works exist in partial occlusion, resulting in certainty being supplanted by imagination.

Mari Carmen Barrios Giordano (Cincinnati, USA, 1990) writes about visual and performing arts in Mexico, the United States, and the Caribbeanfor Artishock, ARTnews, The Art Newspaper, Contemporary And Latin America, Flash Art, Frieze, Glasstire, Revista Cubo Blanco, Southwest Contemporary, La Tempestad, and Terremoto. Her academic publications have appeared in The Oral History Review, History of Photography, and are forthcoming in Photographica. Her writing has also appeared in Revista de la Universidad and Leland Quarterly.