The Brooklyn Rail

As a thoroughfare, Broadway can be traced back to the Native American Wickquasgeck trail that was carved through the bush of the island of Manahatta. In colonial times this became a main street for the settlement of the Dutch West India Company, with one of the only two entry gates into the settlement opening where Trinity Church now stands. (The gate allowed passage beyond the settlement’s grand wall, the namesake of Wall Street.) Broadway pedestrians today might find themselves stepping from the well worn route into Alexander Gray’s newly inaugurated Tribeca gallery, much as I did recently. Here a bright, airy space with clinically white walls leads into Ronny Quevedo’s current exhibition, Composite Portals.

Although personal mythology is central to unpacking Quevedo’s work, this does not stop his pieces from speaking for themselves, starting with their titular reference to an alternate reality. In each work, disparate craft techniques—weaving, plating, gluing, drawing, draping—are deftly married with socio-historical materials like McCall’s sewing patterns, gold leaf, silkscreens, and carbon copy transfers. Layers of textured, toned, and otherwise aggrandized paper come together into intricate, complex tapestries. Neither painting nor drawing, the diverse trove of formal and iconographic references composing Quevedo’s wall works resist easy categorization.

The exhibition opens with body and soul (Reflection Eternal) (2022). Here a crisp sheet of muslin has been stretched taut to take the place of canvas support. Quevedo builds upon his ground thin layers of gold leaf and semi-translucent paper, which upon closer inspection are fragments of sewing patterns. Their textual and symbolic characters are superimposed across layers, criss-crossing between and on top of one another. Drawing formal inspiration from a do-it-yourself sewing pattern (labeled throughout the work in ways familiar to amateur sewers: VEST FRONT A OR B / McCALL’S), the panoply of arrows, dotted lines, and seam markers populating the work’s foreground transcend run-of-the-mill DIY confusion. It’s as if the hustle and bustle of contemporary urban life has overwhelmed even the paint-by-number systems we’ve engineered to simplify it.

Textiles and their history are a familiar stylistic impulse for Quevedo and extend beyond a mere visual inclination to a reflection of personal history and cultural heritage. His mother’s profession as a seamstress infuses his material playfulness with a familial connection, while the deconstructed sewing patterns serve as both media and metaphor.

In quipu (and another one) (2023), thin strips of patterns are glued side by side in a long, continuous row, simultaneously forming subtle vertical stripes and an incongruent mess of truncated sans-serif annotations. Prior to being cut, the patterns seem to have been screenprinted with additional symbols in splashy red, yellow, and blue, these indications now further abstracted as a collage of sheared semiotics. From afar the work looks like a scatter plot, or a cluster of birds in the sky, but its name makes clever reference to a knotted cord device used by the Incas in pre-Columbian times for counting and record keeping.

Quevedo takes a self-referential approach to form, with his interests in explorations of play, mapping, indigeneity, and personal history infusing each piece with a richness of meaning that belies any visual simplicity. If quipu and body and soul resound in formal similarities, their points of departure are vastly different. Here again is a portal, both into the artist’s arsenal of interests and across centuries of textile history. Like a puzzle waiting to be solved, each portal holds not only its own secrets, but the key to the rest of the works on display.

Composite Portals is an odyssey: here Andean history; there, a language of symbols, indecipherable. At the back of the exhibition, hidden behind the main gallery, is a small room holding two sculptural works: comet (2024), and myself when I am real - sin ti soy nadie (2021). The latter consists of chains of leafed paper affixed to a swath of muslin. The fabric lounges in floor-to-ceiling repose, effortlessly draped over a protrusion from the gallery wall. If each piece before it traversed Quevedo’s visual reference points, positioning the viewer as Odysseus, here the viewer is Jason and the work the Golden Fleece.

Quevedo invites us to navigate the space between past and present, tradition and innovation, presenting dynamic explorations of memory and identity that invite contemplation of information lost and found, processes of learning interrupted and redirected. Considering the site of the exhibition itself is a good place to start.