Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

In Her Hauser & Wirth Debut, Firelei Báez Creates Portals for an Imaginative Future Beyond Collapse

"feet squelching on wet grass, nourished by uncertainty" leverages colonial archives, Caribbean cosmologies and liquid abstraction to consider what happens when uncertainty becomes the rule.

A relentless worldbuilder and storyteller whose practice is informed as much by anthropological research as by spiritual sensitivity, Firelei Báez recently made her highly anticipated debut at Hauser & Wirth with “feet squelching on wet grass, nourished by uncertainty.”  The show takes over two floors of the gallery’s 22nd Street space in Chelsea, with a constellation of earthbound paintings and large-scale mythological sculptures on the ground floor and radiant new works on paper upstairs. Drawing on anthropology, geography, folklore, fantasy, science fiction and social history, she layers symbolic languages and appropriated iconographies into an ever-evolving personal mythology that investigates how bodies and nature shape our experience of being in the world, while inviting new imaginative possibilities for seeing this vital relation beyond the imposed—and clearly failing—anthropocentric and capitalist systems that have governed it.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

As we walk through the show with Báez, she seems to float through the space with cadenced ease, describing the exhibition as a bridge between material and immaterial realms, with the works in the exhibition functioning as charged spaces of transition. In a historical moment she sees as intensely panoptic, where every gesture is quantified and made sellable, she is interested in finding freedom in slippage: the in-between spaces of rest, relief and transformation that allow one to see both the past and the present differently, reconnecting and reweaving those threads to envision an alternative future.

Blending parallel narratives and codes of representation, Báez has developed her own alternative system for mapping the history of civilization through the creative appropriation and reworking of colonial historical documents. Unsettling existing archival materials and challenging the conventional linear reading of history, she deconstructs those narratives to open possibilities for alternative viewpoints, connecting her search for fugitive possibility to the writer Octavia Butler, whose speculative fictional worlds emerged from a direct confrontation with the horrors of American history. In Butler’s speculative framework, she sees an imagining of life beyond binary systems, competition and verticality, where new forms of sensing and relation become possible: “In that escape into fiction she found a new life. It made me think what that life would be without the limits of our sense of war, competition, all types of hierarchies and binaries. She got rid of all that.”

Moving between temporalities and spaces, Báez’s densely hybrid visual universes allow different stories to coexist and collide in the service of writing a multilaterally multicultural version of history. Yet within the symbolic density of her entanglements of historical data, maps and natural and fantastical creatures, Báez intentionally preserves a degree of illegibility. Her layered compositions demand a more critical engagement, an active effort to decode the dense stratification that characterizes the human trajectory.

“I feel like there are so many facile filters today, that are labeling everything, consuming it and labeling it again… What is it, instead, to make something that is dense to navigate, so that you can have pockets of rest, pockets of escape, bubbles of being that allow you to become new?” she asks, noting how the human need to analyze and clarify through science and conventional systems of representation is part of an obsessive need for control and possession over our surroundings. For her, illegibility is not a refusal of meaning but a strategy against conscription, and an exercise in embracing the complexity of our position within a broader ecosystem and cosmic entanglement.

Many of Báez’s works begin from sourcing, appropriating and remediating documents of containment and control: diagrams, charts, maps and systems designed to compress entire worlds into two-dimensional fields. She is interested in the false authority of those systems, and in what they leave out. Her overlaying painterly gestures disrupt and unsettle the rational systematicity of these historical materials, becoming colorful symbolic figures that exist between human, animal and mythical beings, revealing signs of encounters among creatures, stories and spiritualities within the........

© Observer