“Omar Barquet: Oracles” at Yancey Richardson in New York: Art Exhibition Review

“Omar Barquet: Oracles,” which is a new, ongoing exhibition at Yancey Richardson gallery in New York City, merges tension with serenity, hearkening to forces of nature that loom in front of everyday life for those residing in areas they affect, like living shadows that explode.

Omar Barquet at Yancey Richardson

Barquet lived through a hurricane as a child in Chetumal, México, the gallery explains, and signifiers that direction appear throughout the mixed media collages that comprise this showcase. The artist’s “3rd Vision, The eye storm (for Licofrón)” (2024) even includes a piece of what’s apparently a book cover that reads, at least as included here, “The Eye Storm.” (Hurricanes, of course, come with “eyes.”)

Barquet builds his artworks like sedimentary rock, with flat, planar materials extending enough towards the viewer to establish the art as a series of sculptural objects while remaining low enough to also present and read as images: the tactile relationship of the assembled artistic elements combined with the overarching flow of the image they create.

And even in that particular fashioning of materials, Barquet’s art starts singing. The emerging physicality of each piece — made evident by the wood textures that the artist leaves in plain view — is subsumed into imagery. It’s a physical experience that transcends itself: a moment in time, whether in the present or imagined in the future, that settles like a cloud across the perceptual horizon.

Now as for some specifics of what Barquet communicates in that manner, the art — time and again — blends a feeling of decay with searing, internally lit glory — though it’s all kept rather quiet, like a faint hum whose origin is itself, it turns out. The intermingling of materials feels restorative, creating a synchronous loop of experiences: the moment, perhaps, when the texture of a seaside destination was new combined with the aftermath of an arriving storm. Loss inherent to the restoration, and restoration stemming from loss. It felt like a moment of pressure but expansive possibility, like looking at an approaching storm’s first indications of its presence and feeling, even then, the sweeping weight carried along behind that and on the way. The slightest of wisps, now an accessibly esoteric signifier.

Barquet’s art suggests something wide-ranging but serenely still in its progression: pieces of wood whose textures evoke, at the very least, age and structural crumbling — but that appear cut to suggest organic, atomic forms and sit against a wooden backing depicting a sun-like form that extends nearly to the edges. A unified push forwards, outwards. The piece that was describing is “Arise (after The Ludovisi throne)” (2024), whose materials include digital print, lacquer oil paint, wood fragments, broken oyster and coconut branches, and a custom artist’s frame, according to the gallery.

Architectural Tension Moving into Glory

“1st Oracle, Divine intervention (for P. Della Francesca)” (2024) features wood in wiry shapes that make me think of Gothic architecture, and in other collages, there are similarly toned elements, which against their more sweeping accompaniments provide what seemed to me the exhibition’s backbone. Across the showcase, I found artful bursts of encircled tension set alongside similarly terse bursts into rapturous euphoria, the latter invoked by the gold that Barquet sometimes utilizes, which reminds me of the golden backgrounds in some historical Christian religious fine art.

In the context of the natural world’s looming threat of calamity upon its human occupants, that casts our surroundings — at least as they interact with us, considering the collages’ even, homely, rectangular forms — as enigmatic: a wiry, winding dance of smoke across our vision.

Collage always makes me think of the passage of time because of the inherent focus on progressive layering and assemblage, and here, I think that — in the experience of natural disasters or moments of interpersonal connection, considering nods to the human form that also appear in the imagery — the progression of time is made into an object religious in both its promise and inspired devotion.

In Barquet’s subsumation of winding edges into consistently even wholes resting time and again on bursts of inwardly illuminating gold, more isolated, everyday moments feel serene, like the expanding, concentric forms that appear in one piece. It’s a peaceful tone for the coasting inevitability of the real-world situations Barquet is addressing: peace that’s blended with foreboding.

He is suggesting, I think, an order — a greater hand, or a greater plan — in otherwise winding or outright demolishing processes that don’t seem reassuring. It doesn’t make those kinds of situations overtly positive or uplifting, instead simply insisting, I think, that there is a language — a higher language — that real-world occurrences like a hurricane are speaking. Destruction can feed into creation; they exist together.

The quietude of Barquet’s art is one thing that is really sticking with me. It’s not overbearing or world-ending. Instead, it’s the art of a moment of standing alone and looking out your window — perhaps as a child, like Barquet was during the hurricane he experienced — to a storm. And Barquet’s quiet textures bring the personal all the way to the top — whether it’s the experience of a hurricane or something else in life. The personal arises, turning majestic.

Barquet’s art moves moment by moment and person by person as the individual tries to in turn bring the stained glass window-promises of heaven or something higher down to them.

“Omar Barquet: Oracles” continues through December 21, 2024, at Yancey Richardson, New York.

Featured image: “Omar Barquet: Oracles” (installation view), Yancey Richardson, New York, October 24 – December 21, 2024. Image courtesy of Yancey Richardson.