Alumnus José Delgado Zuñiga '17 Displays 'Noises' Exhibition at Central Fine in Miami Beach

Visual Arts alumnus José Delgado Zuñiga ’17 will display his painting series Noises at Central Fine in Miami Beach, Florida from February 7, 2021 to March 10, 2021. 

In a press release for the exhibition, Central Fine says Zuñiga’s paintings “evoke the bombardment of love and loss, hope and its musicality; all brought together by an artist set on observing dialectical relationships. This effort ‘implies conflating two distinct notions: impossibility and interdiction. To declare that a given subject is unrepresentable by artistic means is, in fact, to say several things at once.’”

This rich conflation emerges in one of Zuñiga’s paintings titled “No Exit.” A spiral staircase features a giant, ascending figure, whose varied cargo is saturated with color: a man with a dark mustache and shut eyes, oversized keys in silver and gold, flashes of purple and blue, supple like silk. A large set of praying hands rests over the scene, religion and death bounded by domesticity, by the frame. 

According to Zuñiga, "Painting transforms and transitions, exploring with various formal approaches, opening new perspectives and insights. In my work, I attempt to paint representation, abstraction, realism, and illusion in a single frame, a momentary ‘presentness.’ This approach allows me to hack into my identity and mind without worrying about authenticity.”

Zuñiga draws inspiration from the Mexican Corrido ballad format, which uses symbols and signs to build narratives, as well as the sound of music, lyrics, onomatopoeia, and interjections colliding with each other. He also harnesses the power behind fractured rhythms, forms, colors, and rhyming compositions. 

“My body of work functions like a choir sobbing, grunting, chuckling, sighing, painting, sniffing, murmuring... I wrestle with the notion of painting a fixed iconography, because its density and opacity enclose my being, identity, and seeing. It is important to me that meaning is never fixed; it must be fluid, transparent, in flux like paint’s materiality. It must dissolve and transform.”

After completing his MFA, Zuñiga was an Adjunct Professor of Painting at the School of the Arts from 2017 to 2019. He is currently the lead teaching artist and muralist at Groundswell in Brooklyn, New York. 

In 2018, Zuñiga was a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant and the Rema Hort Mann ACE Grant (Artist Community Engagement) as part of the collective LatinX-Files. His first solo exhibition Quotidian was presented at Central Fine in 2019. His paintings have been exhibited at the Yale Divinity School of Sacred Music in New Haven, Connecticut; the Ventura Museum in California; the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery at Columbia University, New York City; East Projects, New York; and in numerous international collections. He was also a participant in the Bronx Museum’s Artists in the Marketplace (AIM).