Miguel Ángel Payano Jr.: Palate Pivots

Charles Moffett is pleased to present Palate Pivots, a solo exhibition of new works by mixed-media artist Miguel Ángel Payano Jr. This marks the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery following his celebrated show Out From in 2023. A current participant in the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Payano has completed much of this new body of work while in residency in the program’s DUMBO studios.

Born in an Afro-Caribbean family in New York and studying in New England before moving to China in his twenties, Payano has always had to navigate between and among several languages and cultures. Learning to communicate across these contexts, Payano became increasingly attuned to the importance of language, in both its efficacy and its failure, to our understanding of and relation to one another. Now living and working between New York and Beijing, the mouth—often depicted in the form of a peach—has become an anchoring motif throughout Payano’s mixed-media practice, evocative of a single celled human. The choice of the peach is a deliberate one. In Chinese culture, the fruit is a potent symbol of springtime, fertility, and long life. Their presence evokes a safeguard for the health and longevity of the subjects within Payano’s works.

At the outset of his artistic training and career, Payano worked mostly in painting; yet, over the last several years, he radically expanded his practice to embrace sculptural and quasi-sculptural forms, and to push his paintings past the traditional picture plane through collaged elements and irregularly shaped panels. We see these genre-bending facets of his practice persist in this new collection of work, represented by a number of the artist’s “heavy collages” — wall-mounted fusions of painting and sculpture that feature the carved peach-mouths embraced by casts of the artist’s hands, and surrounded by images, objects, and materials, found, transformed, and imagined, all assembled together to form uncanny, often humor-filled portraits. The artist continues to challenge the traditional, two-dimensional confines of painting by creating works on curved panels, which emerge from the corner of the gallery and envelop the viewer, immersing them in his imagined scenes, whether a branching forest of peach mouths or the bountiful Koi pond, a symbol of abundance and prosperity.

Yet, alongside these elements of artistic continuity; with this new exhibition, Payano also clearly occupies a moment of transition. Across wood panel paintings both large and small, he is revisiting his roots of more traditional, two-dimensional figurative paintings, including slightly surrealist portraits of figures with birds resting in their mouths, as well as larger renderings of scenes or sequences of events that collapse the order of space and time. A number of these works draw significant conceptual and formal inspiration from transformative journeys the artist took last spring through western China, visiting several of the world’s most significant and remote Buddhist rock-cut caves, some dating from 300 A.D., including the Kizil, Dunhuang, and Maijishan Grottoes and the Shuanglin Temple in Pingyao. Blown away by the longevity and artistry of the paintings, reliefs, and sculptures within these immense cave complexes, Payano was struck by the parallels to his own practice’s fusion of painting and sculpture; as well as by the early legacies of these grottoes, in particular the Kizil Grottoes, as historic examples of multiculturalism. Situated at the beginning of the Silk Road, much of the artworks adorning the grottoes communicate the stories about the Buddha’s past lives, playing an important historical role in introducing Buddhism to China. Deep in these caves, Payano bore witness to the historic power of art in storytelling, in crossing barriers of culture and language, of communicating in ways that words cannot — all elements that have shaped and motivated his own practice for the last two decades.

The artist created the exhibition’s title Palate Pivots to evoke the dichotomy of this balanced state of flux — the persistence of the mouth motif and explorations of language, palate, inflected by the transitory nature of the artist’s relationship to painting, pivots. Payano’s fascination with the endless evolutions, mutations, and meanings of the spoken word acts as a propulsive force underlying his whole creative practice. Yet, in the process of envisioning and creating this show, the artist has also embraced the power and inspiration that emerges in traveling varied paths, in holding true to his particular experiences and enchantments, while also living with an infinite openness to the world around him.

Miguel Ángel Payano Jr. (b. 1980, New York, New York; lives and works between the Bronx, New York and Beijing, China. MFA Hunter College 2021, New York; MFA Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing 2008; BA Williams College 2003.) Payano has shown his work widely around the world, including recent institutional and gallery solo exhibitions at UCCA Beijing (2024), BANK in Shanghai (2024), Charles Moffett in New York (2023 and 2021), Unit London (2023), Galleria Poggiali in Milan (2022), and Make Room in Los Angeles (2021); as well as recent gallery group exhibitions at Simon Lee in London (2022), Ben Brown Fine Arts in Hong Kong (2022), and Droste Gallery in Paris (2021). He is a current resident of the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in DUMBO, New York, which provides 17 visual artists annually with year-long, rent-free studio space and critical support for emerging and mid-career creative.