Independent Art Fair 2024
Charlie James Gallery is proud to present new works by Danie Cansino at the 2024 Independent Art Fair, the artist’s first solo presentation in New York. A Los Angeles-based artist and educator with roots in tattooing, Cansino employs Baroque grisaille techniques in paintings that cast BIPOC and especially Chicano bodies in large, allegorical compositions that propose new subjects for the art historical canon. Drawing inspiration from Old Master paintings in both subject and execution, Cansino emphatically centers Brown, tattooed bodies in grand compositions that elevate her own Los Angeles community. In addition to these large paintings, the Independent presentation will include landscapes, paintings on Mexican serapes, and a tattoo-inflected drawing in ballpoint pen.
Two of the large paintings recast classical demons as Mexican alebrijes, ancestral spirit guides in the form of brightly-colored creatures. Sueños takes as its inspiration Francisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, substituting Goya’s benighted European gentleman for a tattooed Chicana nude, while Pesadillas Con Gatijos reimagines Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, replacing two menacing monsters with magical renditions of artist’s two beloved cats. Cansino’s paintings look to the 18th century not just in subject, but also in execution. Using a traditional grisaille technique, she completes the detailed linework in underpainting before adding color and shading in built up layers of glaze. This results in richly toned, deeply saturated color that also seems to catch and refract light.
This luminous transparency lends itself beautifully to Cansino’s treatment of flesh. A careful attention to skin and the contour of bodies is inherent to tattooing, a medium in which she has extensive experience. A large painting after Caravaggio’s Narcissus features a young man peering into his own reflection, allowing the viewer to see the fully-rendered tattoos that cover the back of his bald head, curve around his throat, and blanket his exposed arms. Cansino highlights a very particular style of Chicano tattooing that has roots in prison culture and the political movements of the latter 20th century, whose symbolism and popularity reflects deeply held cultural pride.
The Independent presentation will also include two serape paintings, in which Cansino works directly on traditional Mexican textiles. These works tightly focus on Chicana hands in familiar daily settings that suggest an intimacy borne of shared experience: drinking coffee, smoking, playing pool. They are individuated by their elaborate rings, tattoos, and long painted nails. These works continue Cansino’s project of centering Chicano bodies within her work, and especially those of her own community. The serapes are stretched on frames with the excess fabric left to hang from all sides, emphatically asserting their own objecthood.
Cansino archives the tattooed line in Reinas, a drawing in ballpoint pen on lined paper executed using a tattoo machine. The paper will weather much like skin, creating a parallel timeline that speaks to the essential ephemerality of the medium. Elsewhere, radiant painted landscapes depict the vast Los Angeles skies criss-crossed with the power lines and barbed wire that are ubiquitous in the neighborhoods south and east of downtown Los Angeles. Throughout the works on view, Cansino continually draws the viewer’s attention to her own history and community, anchoring the work in the Chicano experience and centering stories and bodies overlooked in the art historical canon.
Danie Cansino (b. 1986) is an artist and educator living and working in Los Angeles. Danie Cansino’s work manifests in bold chiaroscuro oil paintings and vividly rendered ballpoint drawings on loose-leaf paper, mounted to panel. The subject territory of her drawings and paintings originates from herself, her family members and close friends, and the geography of their shared surroundings - their homes, their neighborhoods, their city. The geographies of the work all stand in evidence of long-standing inhabitation by generations of Cansino’s people as they grow up, move forward, and pass on. Cansino describes her work as a love letter to her family, city, and culture, and a remembrance of the suffrage of the Chicanx and Latinx people of Los Angeles.
Cansino completed her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Southern California, and is an Adjunct Professor of USC Roski School of Art and Design. Cansino's work has been featured in ArtForum, Artillery, and ArtNews magazine. Her work resides in the collections of the Rubell Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, AltaMed, in addition to numerous private collections. She has exhibited in the Rubell museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, Muzeo museum, Vincent Price museum, UCLA, AMOCA, UTA Artists Space, Felix Art Fair, Human Resources Gallery, The Mistake Room, USC Roski, Thinkspace, Tlaloc studios and Charlie James Gallery. Danie Cansino is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.
INDEPENDENT ART FAIR 2024
Venue
Spring Studios
50 Varick St.
New York, NY 10013
Fair Dates
May 9 – 12, 2024
Thursday, May 9 - Preview Day: Invitation Only
Public Hours:
Friday, May 10: 11AM – 7PM
Saturday, May 11: 11AM – 7PM
Sunday, May 12: 11AM – 6PM
Selected Works
installation
