René Treviño: Star-Crossed | Erin Cluley Gallery

Erin Cluley Gallery is pleased to announce Star-Crossed, an exhibition of new and recent works by Baltimore-based artist René Treviño. Recognized for their technical skill and expansive frame of historical reference, Treviño’s paintings dissect the political and cultural meanings of symbols from astrology, art history, and global cultures. His experiments with materiality and media include painting, collage, and fiber sculpture. The work’s technical execution emphasizes the importance of labor and artistic diligence to his conceptual practice. Star-Crossed brings together art from the last five years of Treviño’s practice, with new works, to reimagine how cultures derive meaning and stake claims in the terrestrial sphere and cosmos. Treviño’s approach to historical reference reimagines cultural symbols with a queer, progressive sensibility. His constellation paintings replace Greco-Roman astrological names with elements from Mesoamerican codices and color charts. These works imagine expansiveness of cultural heritage through the expansiveness of the cosmos. The artist’s Regalia series blend elements of European coronation robes and Aztec regalia. A series of three large-scale paintings painstakingly recreate diagrams of Geodesic domes from Edward Popko’s book Geodesics (1968). Viewed from a birds-eye perspective, these triangle-based structures display formal similarities to the eyes of insects like Flies—another recurring motif in Treviño’s work. The artist’s broad frame of reference flattens cultural and generational divisions to imagine diverse futures. The exhibition will feature a selection of works from the artist’s Celestial Body-ody-ody series (2020-2023). Highly-detailed and embellished, these circular paintings depict planets, brain coral, an Aztec disk, planets, and recreations of Albrecht Dürer’s “Knot” engravings. Treviño’s collage series, Portobello Star Charts (I-VI), reuses European astrological diagrams adding stamp designs discovered at the Bactri-Margiana Archaeological Complex; a site in Central Asia dedicated to researching the Bronze Age, Oxus civilization. These stamp designs were originally used to emboss ceramics and have a visual likeness to ancient Mesoamerican clay and bone stamps. The collages also include other Mesoamerican imagery, color wheels, and sequin appliques. The artist’s eclectic mixing of these symbols and materials problematize ideas of institutional claim over objects and environments. The title of Treviño’s newest solo presentation refers to the Shakespearean phrase stemming from an ancient belief in astrology’s connection to human fate. The artist’s interest in ornamentation and vivid hues underscore his radical optimism and celebration of cross-cultural exchange. While the works arise from historical research, Star-Crossed expresses Treviño’s artistic conception of futurity; a point down the line where legacies of colonialism and cultural repression are dissolved into equities and reparations.  Star-Crossed will be the artist’s fifth solo presentation with Erin Cluley Gallery. It will be exhibited concurrently with Alexa Brooks’ Patterns of Catastrophe.