Untitled Art, Houston 2025
For Untitled Art Houston, Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino presents a selection of works by modernist master Carlos Cruz-Diez [1923–2019] and contemporary artists Gustavo Díaz [1969], Melanie Smith [1965], and Jorinde Voigt [1977]. Although separated in time and geography, these four artists embrace perception and the psyche as the foundation of the series featured in the booth. Their singular practices create an engaging dialogue that prompts viewers to surrender to careful observation in an era that increasingly tests the limits of our attention span. This cross-generational conversation represents the core of Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino’s program, which extends to and beyond the Latin American avant-garde.
Carlos Cruz-Diez dedicated his life to studying color and rhythm through line. Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino’s booth will feature two Physichromies, executed by Cruz-Diez within the last ten years of his life. Translated as "physical color", Physichromies mark the cornerstone of Cruz-Diez’s engaging and perspective-bending kinetic works. Beginning with strips of color arranged meticulously into geometric compositions, the Physichromie becomes activated when the viewer approaches and moves around the work. In this sense, the artist calls for viewers to move slowly and immerse themselves in another version of reality. Physichromie Panam 122 (2013) and Physichromie 1886 (2014) are remarkable examples of Cruz-Diez’s mastery over perception and his lifelong dedication to this groundbreaking series.
Melanie Smith’s work, in diverse media, has reflected on the extended field of painting within the history of art and its entanglement with moving images. Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Smith’s solo exhibition Remain Detached at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino debuted the chaotic and disorientating video, Fifteen Minutes of Sublime Meditation, alongside delicate paintings, titled Psychoactive Renders. Both bodies of work explore the themes of isolation and perception in a post-COVID context. For Untitled, Smith will present a series of Psychoactive Renders. Each work is meticulously hand-painted using pigments on veneered wood panels, producing a destabilizing sense of movement and spatial orientation. Just as Cruz-Diez halts viewers with his expansive Physichromies, so too does Smith in her call to look carefully and slowly at each Psychoactive Render.
For over a dozen years, Gustavo Díaz committed himself to researching the behavior of complexity. Díaz presents his findings through intricate, abstract works on paper and installations that map the conceptual connections between disparate, yet related, theories. Through this intense artistic and academic journey, he has examined subjects such as the study of Chaos Theory, in particular issues related to Ilya Prigogine’s concept of Dissipative Structures, for which Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1977, as well as René Thom’s Theory of Catastrophes, focusing on the rupture of linearity and the emergence of “the new” through discontinuity processes. Diaz is a master draftsman, capable of drawing minute almost microscopic patterns, both with just pencil-and-paper, as well as on a computer tablet. His computer-mediated drawings are then cut with a laser paper cutter, so that the output is a delicate lace that is then meticulously collaged onto a paper support. The final products dazzle viewers with their intricacy, virtuosity, and abstract beauty.
Jorinde Voigt is a leading conceptual artist whose work explores the inner processes of perception in relation to emotions, imagination, sensory experience, and relationships. Although Voigt has produced carefully crafted sculptures, she works mainly within the media of drawing and painting, utilizing a coded system that seeks to map her understanding of her inner mental world as well as our outer shared world. Often using music as a starting point for a composition, Voigt imbues action and performance into her work. Indeed, her work is a rare mixture of gesture and calculation. She blends techniques across a media to produce complex and stunningly beautiful constellations of thought. Numbers, geometries, graphic schemata, unpredictable patterns, and exotic pictorial conventions often share the pictorial space she generates with lines, shapes and color.