Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Delicadeza Óptica: Cada Vez Que te Hablo Estamos Cocinando, featuring the work of Devin Osorio and Joaquín Stacey-Calle. Both artists play with ideas of presence and absence, alternately revealing and concealing details that speak to their interest in history, community, and care. Both use imagery from the natural world, calling upon complex histories of growth, healing, and decay. Distinct in vision and execution, these two bodies of work together offer intimate glimpses into unique and singular worlds conjured within the space of the paintings.

Osorio draws upon the Dominican culture and folklore that formed an integral part of their Washington Heights upbringing. They tell personal narratives by inserting their own likeness into compositions infused with magical realism, relating complex histories in moving, fantastical scenes that are grounded in experience and memory. Soy Arbol do Muchos Frutos powerfully accomplishes this transmutation between one’s physical form and one’s communal and ancestral heritage. The central figure, a self-portrait, stares straight out at the viewer, palms up as if to receive heavenly gifts. A lush tree sprouts from their center and grows both pineapples and cherries – three-dimensional ceramic objects that have been affixed to the canvas. The idea of hybridity recurs in Osorio’s work, teasing out the complexities of being the child of immigrants and the ways that a new land can nurture this hybrid sense of self.

Stacey-Calle’s lyrical Controlled decay (intimacy of strangers) series employs anonymous bodies, their images often cropped or partially withheld, in spare paintings that merge figuration and abstraction. His compositional sense is a poetic dance of revelation and obscuration, one born of a fascination with the naturally occurring growth patterns of lichens and the natural world’s various processes of decay. He pays particular attention to shadow, in that all deeper colors have been removed from view, leaving behind pale, mysterious landscapes that feel like they are the remnants of a slowly decomposing surface.

Both Osorio and Stacey-Calle play with scale. Bodies commingle with outsized flora in Stacey-Calle’s paintings; they are dwarfed by clusters of fruits and fanned tropical leaves, or perhaps floating through the microscopic world of algae and fungi. Likewise, Osorio positions figures, plants, and architecture on equal footing in works such as Medicina de Amor. This painting on woven palm – a new medium for Osorio – is an ode to care and healing, using the meticulous preparation of homebrewed teas as a manifestation of familial love. The curving Hudson River, towering apartment buildings, and lush riverside hilltops support the dancing couples of a Washington Heights block party but also the sink and burners of a humble kitchen, merging interior and exterior and collapsing multiple points of view.

Osorio continues this theme of healing through libation in three paintings in the shape of small, beaded pouches traditionally meant to hold blessings or spells. Each embodies a particular healing concoction, tea, or cocktail that is meant to sustain a loved one. The image of the Dominican figure Santa Marta la Dominadora has been embroidered onto the pouch and recurs elsewhere across this body of work wielding a snake and riding a turtle. She is the Catholicized reincarnation of Mami Wata, her dual nature an embodiment of colonialism’s legacy in the Caribbean. Stacey-Calle focuses on the healing nature of remembrance and forgetting, the essential holding close and letting go of details and histories. Of course, knowledge that is recorded and that which is omitted from history has a political weight, one deeply tied to the colonialist project. Stacey-Calle’s tender paintings seem to reach back into memory via a dreamspace of forgotten details, suggesting that the way forward may necessitate a looking back.