manuel arturo abreu
Salomon
October 9 – November 20, 2021

The birds (priests of dust) called it: a lover is a phone with wings, not a cord. When the line goes dead, the knowing look loses the shape of each eye. There was a final dove that was not allowed to cross the rain. The illusion of you is subtle: your tiny mother held you by a string as you gulped light, spitting it back out Nauman-style but each drop became a fish. When Vardaman said My mother is a fish you know he was talking about you, when you cried during assembly and said “my mother is dead” after a harmless yo mama joke. The spirit of your ancestor who lost her parents very young had stepped in.

Veronica presents Salomon, a solo exhibition by Portland-based Dominican artist manuel arturo abreu which explores the slippage between theophany (god manifestations), automatism, and genealogy. 

The titular piece stages the dramatic spiritual struggle between abreu and an uncle: charcoal, dried eggshell powder, water, and flour transpose ritual and psychonautic wall markings by abreu’s uncle from a room in San Cristobal, Dom. Rep. to the gallery. By means of a spatialization of text, or textualization of space, abreu salutes their uncle’s intense spiritual power, yet also processes the tension and mistakes of their kinship.

Straddling a line between the private languages of psychosis and prayer, and bespeaking legacies of ancestral cryptography, the transposed marks include cryptic graffito sigils, Bible passages, and a figure which could pass for either the Statue of Liberty or the prophet Tiresias. abreu juxtaposes these with their own wall works, such as a tree with eyes and a drawing of Liborio (a Dominican messianic revolutionary figure murdered by the state during US occupation). As well, the show includes various sculptures: a sharpener from the Southeast Portland garage where abreu lived and worked from 2014-2019 (the garage residency), an ex-library book with nails driven through it (The Golden Millstones, R.F. Delderfield’s biography of Napoleon’s siblings) and four ‘pillows’ consisting of stuffed asemic prints on canvas.

Rather than ‘cancel’ their uncle, nostalgically turn him to a saint, or challenge him, abreu seeks to mine the potential in the clash by juxtaposing their respective crafts. Guyanese writer Wilson Harris– another powerful spiritual trickster– said the ‘artist’ is but a debt to (a) their communities and (b) adversarial contexts. The contour of the owed in kin context reminds one of how the full saying is actually ‘the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.’

—manuel arturo abreu

Raised in the Bronx, manuel arturo abreu is a Dominican non-disciplinary artist working with what is at hand in a process of magical thinking, with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics. They have lived and worked in Portland, OR since 2009. With Victoria Anne Reis, they co-founded and co-run home school, a free pop-up art school in Portland in its sixth year of genre-nonconforming edutainment curriculum.