Carlos Reyes: 18

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On a low pedestal in the foreground, seven standing lamps are conjoined by a single ring-shaped lampshade. A neat coil of pale cord sits near the base of each lamp. The sculpture is flanked, in the background, by two chevron-shaped wall pieces. The one on the left is dark, while the one on the right is pale.

At Left: 18 # 2, 2023. At Center: PROMESA, 2021. At Right: 18 #1, 2023. Installation view: Carlos Reyes: 18, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2023. Courtesy the artist, Derosia, New York, and Soft Opening, London. Photo: Dario Lasagni

 

Location
Reference Gallery
Featured Artists
Carlos Reyes
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In fall 2023, the MIT List Visual Arts Center will present Carlos Reyes’s first museum solo exhibition.

Sculpture is a primary medium for the New York- and Puerto Rico-based artist, whose works are concerned with material investigations of infrastructure, architecture, and other designed objects that we encounter in our built environments. His elegant sculptures feature found materials that bear traces of their former use, such as graffiti-etched cedar planks salvaged from a bathhouse and “exhausted” treadmill belts stretched and scuffed from wear. Other works cannily recast everyday items—plastic supermarket egg cartons and IKEA lamps, for instance—into sculptural configurations. While the austere forms of many of Reyes’s sculptures and installations cite those of Minimalism, they refocus its historical emphasis on industrial finish to instead foreground visible residues—whether embodied energy like breath and touch, or transitory forces like light and heat—that are exerted on objects and architectural elements over time. In doing so, Reyes indexes human activity within spaces and systems that are socially or politically produced, and gestures towards the networks of circulation, use, and exchange that shape these movements.

Carlos Reyes (b. 1977, Chicago, IL) lives and works in New York and Caguas, Puerto Rico. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Soft Opening, London (2021); Waldo, Maine (2020); Bodega (Derosia), New York (2018); Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris (2019); Vie d’Ange, Montreal (2018); White Flag Projects, St. Louis (2015); and Arcadia Missa, London (2015). Reyes has been featured in group exhibitions at Centre Pompidou d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Aspen Art Museum, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague; the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal; PPOW, New York; Société, Berlin; Luxembourg and Dayan, New York; Tanya Leighton, Berlin; Bortolami, New York; and Praz Delavallade, Paris; among others. Reyes has received fellowships and residencies from Urban Glass, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Denniston Hill. His work is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Reyes’s exhibition is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator.

Sponsors

General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Vice Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. This exhibition is also supported by generous donors to the 2023 McDermott Award Gala, hosted by the Council for the Arts at MIT. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged. 

Additional support for Reyes’s exhibition is provided by the Henry Moore Foundation. 

Images

In the foreground, seven standing lamps are conjoined by a single ring-shaped lampshade. This large sculpture sits on a low pedestal. Behind it, four oblong wooden sculptures hang. A smaller chevron-shaped white sculpture is affixed to a wall in the background.
On a low pedestal in the foreground, seven standing lamps are conjoined by a single ring-shaped lampshade. A neat coil of pale cord sits near the base of each lamp. Behind it, small glass sculptures sit on a shelf, indistinct from the white wall behind them. A chevron-shaped wall piece is affixed to the wall nearby.
In the foreground, four oblong sculptures hang in formation, each made from planks of reclaimed wood. A standing lamp peaks out from behind one of the sculptures. An uneven shelf runs along the back wall.
In the foreground, four oblong sculptures hang in formation, each made from planks of reclaimed wood. They hover an inch or so above the floor. Other artworks are visible in the background, including a large sculpture made of seven conjoined lamps and two chevron-shaped wall pieces.
Four oblong sculptures hang in formation, each made from planks of reclaimed wood. They hover an inch or so above the floor. Some sections of wood are missing and replaced with glass. A person walks among the sculptures.
On a low pedestal in the foreground, seven standing lamps are conjoined by a single ring-shaped lampshade. The photograph is taken from a low angle so the “hole” in the center of the lampshade is visible. A neat coil of pale cord sits near the base of each lamp. An oblong wooden sculpture hangs in the background, monolith-like.
On the right, an unusually large lampshade is partially visible and illuminated from within. Three lamp stems, each with a metal pull chain, extend downwards from different parts of the shade. On the right, a sculpture made from reclaimed wooden planks hangs monolith-like, hovering an inch or so above the floor.
Three glass sculptures sit on a shelf affixed to a white wall. They resemble odd vessels or bottles, with rounded indentations or craters. The vessel in the middle has a long and subtly tapering neck, and sits horizontally. The one on the right sits upright, and appears to be choked by a tight band of metal near its base.
Four glass sculptures sit on a shelf against a white wall. They resemble stretched, deformed, or indented vessels. The shelf sinks to accommodate a bulkier sculpture, the top of which is level with the rest of the shelf. Its flat top contains a round drain cover, like one you would find in a shower.
On a low pedestal in the foreground, seven standing lamps are conjoined by a single ring-shaped lampshade. A neat coil of pale cord sits near the base of each lamp. The sculpture is flanked, in the background, by two chevron-shaped wall pieces. The one on the left is dark, while the one on the right is pale.

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Carlos Reyes: 18

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