Carlos Rosales-Silva | Sun Kiss

February 28 – April 5, 2025

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present Sun Kiss, New York-based artist Carlos Rosales-Silva’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Known for his bold, abstract compositions that contend with postcolonial visual culture, Rosales-Silva creates mixed-media paintings that are destabilizing explorations of color, texture, and shape. 

The works in Sun Kiss range from immersive to intimately scaled, produced both in situ at the gallery and during Rosales-Silva’s recent visits to New Mexico. The two site-specific murals were designed and painted by the artist specifically for the exhibition, continuing his exploration of how form and color operate at monumental scales, this time in the context of the gallery’s architecture.  Conversely, the smaller paintings in the exhibition were produced primarily while he was in residence in Las Cruces, New Mexico, not far from his childhood home and near the militarized Mexican-American border. The vernacular architecture of that region inspires the stucco-like impasto of Rosales-Silva’s works, which he produces by blending crushed stone and tiny glass beads into acrylic pigments, creating a highly saturated, matte, textured surface. 

The environment of the Mexico-U.S. border is also a primary source of Rosales-Silva’s visual language and his practice of cultural and formal abstraction. His compositions echo the hybridity of border spaces, blending man-made and natural, geometric and biomorphic, real and imagined elements into unified compositions.  Figure and ground are rarely legible or stable categories in his work, as colors contrast and merge in unexpected combinations. Each field of color exists entirely in relation to those around it, legible only through relationships of interdependence. 

This understanding of color theory mirrors Rosales-Silva’s understanding of formal inspiration and citation. He writes, “I often think of my paintings as an ongoing research project of visual citation. In a lot of ways postcolonial theory is the practice of citation, revealing the consequences of colonial and imperial rule, which are ongoing… For me, a critical engagement with modern and contemporary painting is a way to cite influences by Indigenous cultures that have remained uncited and used as raw material.”  The works in Sun Kiss reinterpret forms from Art Nouveau furniture, to Mexican Modernist architecture, to Chicano arts murals, all of which drew upon Indigenous sources. Brought together in Rosales-Silva’s hybrid lexicon, they inform and intertwine with one another, producing an alluring state of disorientation that confronts contemporary cultures of extraction and isolation.

Carlos Rosales-Silva (b. 1982, El Paso, TX) was born on the border of the United States and Mexico in El Paso, Texas. His studio practice considers the vernacular culture in the American Southwest, the western canon of art history, and the political and cultural connections and disparities between them. Carlos graduated from The School of Visual Arts (New York, NY) with a Masters in Fine Arts in 2020 and received his BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas Austin (Austin, TX) in 2010. He currently lives and works in New York, NY. 

Rosales-Silva has exhibited throughout the United States and Mexico. He has been an artist-in-residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2024); Abrons Art Center in New York, NY (2021); Residency Unlimited in New York, NY (2020); Artpace in San Antonio, Texas (2018); and at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY (2017). Recent solo exhibitions include Sargent’s Daughters (Los Angeles, CA) and Ruiz Healy Art (New York, NY), The School of Visual Arts (New York, NY), Sadie Halie Projects (Minneapolis, MN), amongst others. Rosales-Silva has participated in group shows at Sargent’s Daughters (Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY), North Loop (Williamstown, MA), Seasons LA (Los Angeles, CA), Latinx Project at NYU (New York, NY), White Columns (New York, NY), Ruiz Healy Art (San Antonio, TX), Beverly’s (New York, NY), and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), amongst others. His work has been reviewed by ARTnews, Artnet News, Artspace, Hyperallergic, Glasstire, Whitehot Magazine, amongst others.  Rosales-Silva’s work is in the permanent collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art (San Antonio, TX). He has permanent site-specific murals at The Momentary (Bentonville, AK) and New Mexico State University (Las Cruces, NM). He is represented by Ruiz Healy Art in Texas and Sargent’s Daughters in Los Angeles and New York.