DALTON GATA

His work ‘Vampiro Tropicon’, on loan from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody is a self-portrait of the artist as not only a vampire but also as a vase for tropical flowers. The face contours into a partial grin, partial grimace, flowers sprouting from the cavity of the figure's head. Gata’s works take the form of the exquisite corpse, an assemblage, operating through humor and melancholy alike, drawing on the visual language of surrealism and stylized realism to situate us in a liminal, crossover space – between dreaming and waking life, fantasy and reality. His work centers this hybridity, with characters that include fusions of multiple creatures, bodies, and temporalities. Gata’s canvases explore the liminal border zone between fantasy, reality, familiar, grotesque, uncanny, urbanity and the rural.

Gata draws on a personal archive of images to explore queer and popular culture as well as psychological and mythical symbols. The artist’s works create complex narratives that bring to life his own experience of immigration and the diasporic conditions of Cuba in the Caribbean. Gata is represented in ICA Miami’s permanent collection, and his work has been presented in galleries internationally. He received a BFA in fashion design from the Altos del Chavón Design School, Santo Domingo. 

The characters in his recent body of work take on lives that extend and diverge beyond the originator, usually the artist’s own friends and family. They are arranged in constellations reminiscent of Renaissance portraiture, rigid in posture, icily returning the gaze of the viewer, they seem to make a claim for their own agency and inner world. The feminine figures in these works are unapologetic, centered in the composition, adornments to the body like hair and heels act to extend and facilitate the occupation of space. Gata’s luminous and vivid paintings are celebrations of these figures, reverent and enamored, Gata builds his house to commemorate them. Besides evoking the canon of renaissance painting, Gata’s work builds upon Latin American Surrealism, drawing on his own background, foregrounding the overlapping cultures of the Caribbean which are deeply rooted in African and Spanish histories.