Hoffmann + Maler + Wallenberg is pleased to announce Fabrizio Arrieta: Interlude, an intimate display featuring four paintings by Costa Rican artist Fabrizio Arrieta (b. 1982, San José). This occasion marks the artist’s second collaboration with the gallery. Rather than an extensive exhibition, the show bridges Arrieta’s 2021 show with his upcoming exhibition at Hoffmann + Maler + Wallenberg in the fall of 2024.

Three paintings are Arrieta’s distinctive medium-size portraits known for their uniquely metamorphic style. They offer a glimpse into the artist’s evolving creative process in that they continue to draw from preexisting online imagery, but increasingly also from the depths of the artist’s imagination. The otherworldly figures have become even more enigmatic due to intensified fragmentation, a gradual crumbling of figuration into geometric abstraction. Arrieta expertly manipulates depth, dimension, and identity, blending reality and illusion to suggest a captivatingly ambiguous relationship between observer and portrayed subject. The disrupted portraits Tito (2022) and Ariel (2022) blend classic early twentieth-century influences such as Jean Metzinger’s portraits and the extreme multiple-perspective representations of Juan Gris with the iconography of today’s digital age. While Tito burgeons in bright colors, Ariel’s colors are various shades of gray on a dark purple background covered with tiny black dots.

The centerpiece and focal point of the presentation is La conquista de la inocencia (The Conquest of Innocence, 2023), a portrait of a fractured figure in blue pumps triumphantly resting a foot on what could be either a high-rise building or stray packing material. Arrieta utilizes his vocabulary of nostalgic 1980s touches to soften a jarring entity that’s both cyberpunk and power suit, yet also harks back to the legacy of early twentieth-century avant-garde painting, Cubism in particular.

Arrieta’s hypnotizing eyes, alluring lips, dissected noses, and other divided and subdivided disembodied elements speak simultaneously of nameless seclusion and vigilant observation. The execution reflects meticulous contemplation and skillful technique; while seemingly made with the help of airbrush tools, every part of the carefully executed paintings is done with traditional paintbrushes. The compositions challenge the construction of contemporary identity, a process increasingly shaped by digital interactions and idealized representations. Yet rather than disheartening the viewer through these intersections, the paintings energize and seduce with their reflections that overlay and obscure blurred and layered visages.

Fabrizio Arrieta’s paintings have been featured in a multitude of exhibitions over the last decade and a half. His most recent solo exhibitions took place at 56 HENRY in New York (2022) and DiabloRosso in Panama City (2023). Currently he is preparing his most significant exhibition to date for Carl Kostyál Gallery, Stockholm, scheduled to open in 2024.