by Jonathan Curiel

he giant disco ball has crushed a woman to death. Or is that a girl? It's hard to tell since we only see the figure's legs and striped stockings. And it's hard to tell because the macabre scene has unfolded outdoors — amid vegetation that artist Gonzalo Fuenmayor has painstakingly drawn to contrast the disco ball's sea of refracting tiles. Then there's Fuenmayor's trademark veneer of charcoal-induced grays, whites, blacks, and in-between shades, which produces a kind of dark-humored X-ray of murder — a freeze-frame of fantastical layers that's entirely appropriate for a canvas with the title, "The Innocence of Savages."
 

The Innocence of Savages, 2026 | Ink and charcoal on paper | 45 x 45 inches

Visitors to Fuenmayor's exhibit at Dolby Chadwick Gallery should be prepared to be in the mood for autopsies. Each artwork in Fuenmayor's new series is an examination of lightness and darkness, and of levity and enmity. There's beauty in Fuenmayor's art. Of course, there is. But he's broken all the borders that would clearly distinguish lightness from darkness and beauty from non-beauty. They're all intertwined, making a scene like "The Innocence of Savages" a crime scene that requires forensic tools of perception, and an understanding that Fuenmayor's X-rays — like real ones on the wall of a medical room — reveal undeniable truths about traumas usually unseen and ignored by the naked eye.

Fuenmayor's subject is cultural colonialism and its often-ignored parallel occurrence: Exotification of "the other." These parallel throughlines are personal for Fuenmayor, a Colombian native who moved to the United States decades ago and experienced firsthand the kind of reductive stereotyping that even seemingly intelligent people can resort to when they encounter someone from a culture that isn't theirs. Name-calling is one manifestation, but so too is simplifying an entire people — which is why, as one example, Fuenmayor has consistently toyed with stereotypes of Latin American culture, as with his portraits that feature Carmen Miranda, the 20th-century Brazilian singer whose frivolous fruit hats become something complex and even ominous under Fuenmayor's tutelage. 

Carmen Leda II, 2026 | Charcoal on paper | 65 x 45 inches

In "Carmen Leda II" at Dolby Chadwick, Fuenmayor perches three swans atop Miranda's head in a reference to the mythological Greek story of the god Zeus having sexual relations with a royal figure named Leda. Many historic accounts of their relationship call what Zeus did rape, so "Carmen Leda II" is — like "The Innocence of Savages" — an autopsy of violence without obvious blood stains. And yet: You can see the swans and Carmen Miranda's visage and come away with a smirk if, without context, all you see are the striking animals and ornamentation that coagulate in unison. Ha-ha. Go ahead and laugh at the surreal scene if you want, Fuenmayor seems to be saying implicitly and in a catalog that accompanies the exhibit, where he writes: "As the past, present, the exotic and the familiar collide, absurd and fantastic panoramas arise. I am looking for a viewer who will negotiate his firsthand expectations with my work."

That's Exotic Folks!, 2026 | Ink, enamel, and charcoal on paper | 45 x 45 inches

Explicitly funny art appears in A Certain Slant of Light, epitomized by the piece called "That's Exotic Folks!" — which prints those exact words across a scene of Latin American parrots, and is an obvious allusion to the Looney Tunes sign-off, "That's all, folks!," that became associated with the often-naive-and-dufus-like Porky Pig character. The humor that Fuenmayor embeds in A Certain Slant of Light is in the tradition of such artists and writers as Binyavanga Wainaina, whose 2005 Granta essay "How to Write About Africa" was a masterclass in satire and poking fun of Western stereotyping of non-Western people and cultures. Like Wainaina, who played with every insipid view of Africa (as in ". . .  Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize . . . "), Fuenmayor takes widespread perceptions of Latin America and emphasizes their profound absurdity. A more famous writer than Wainaina, Emily Dickinson, helped inspire A Certain Slant of Light since Fuenmayor created his exhibit title after reading Dickinson's poem of almost the same name. In it, Dickinson opines about the paradox of a winter light that:

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

The Madness of Pride, 2026 | Charcoal on paper | 45 x 45 inches

With the poem's obsession with shadows and death and light's impact on people's internal selves, it's as if Dickinson wrote There's a certain Slant of light centuries ago just for Fuenmayor. At Dolby Chadwick, his best works of living people show them glowing with light that seems to emanate from within. "The Madness of Pride" is particularly arresting. A person walks tightrope-style across the trunk of a badly bent palm tree — balancing precariously while holding onto a tightrope pole, all while heading towards the tree's fronds that overlook some kind of watery abyss. "The Madness of Pride" becomes a stand-in for anyone who's tried to navigate an idealized version of a cultural identity that they've internalized to an extreme. One wrong step and . . . kaboom! A death of identity occurs. The light in "The Madness of Pride" seems almost radioactive, like we're witnessing a post-apocalyptic world where everything — including the source of light and the angles of palm trees — is topsy-turvy. In fact, there's something "off" about nearly every scene in A Certain Slant of Light.

The Rehearsal of Splendor, 2026 | Ink and charcoal on paper | 82 x 90 inches

In "The Rehearsal of Splendor," seals have taken over the interior of a grand palace, where they're practicing a circus act amid grandiose paintings, woodwork, chandeliers, and other expensive hallmarks of privilege. One seal sits on a velvet chair. Next to the animal is a giant disco ball — the same one, perhaps, that crushed a human in "The Innocence of Savages." Where are the seals' trainers? Are the animals in control here?

There are an endless number of ways to interpret Fuenmayor's meticulously drawn panoramas, but I'll settle on this: Exoticizing others can carry a steep price — not just on the exoticized but the exoticizer. By reducing the world to stereotypical brushstrokes, people shut down the possibilities of depth, nuance, and contradictions. The antithesis of openness is a kind of closed casket. It's a veritable death, in other words. Only a certain kind of light can penetrate that kind of metaphorical casket. In this view, the light we see in A Certain Slant of Light is man-made since it's coming not from the sun or the moon or something extraterrestrial but from Fuenmayor's own being. Levity helps bring in the light and the lightness we see in Fuenmayor's canvases. How long this perception lasts is entirely up to the viewer.