At Cassina Projects in Milan, Viscous presents itself as a corporeal theater of psychological entanglement, where fluidity—both material and ideological—dictates the boundaries of perception.
The exhibition gathers María Fragoso Jara, Wang Haiyang, Zsófia Keresztes, Jessie Makinson, and Oda Iselin Sønderland, five artists who probe the grotesque, the amorphous, and the seductive through a spectrum of painterly and sculptural expressions. Their works dissolve the neat categorizations of human experience, instead embracing hybridity, desire, and the uncanny as guiding forces.
Wang Haiyang’s acrylic works, Time, Space, Memory, and Sunyata and Blue Pill, function as both intimate confessionals and critical interventions. In their voyeuristic haze, they unsettle the binary lexicon of desire, presenting sexuality as an ever-mutable, performative condition. A similar oscillation between the symbolic and the carnal pervades María Fragoso Jara’s Nido, where plump, hybrid beings nestle within a sanguine-colored tableau, invoking devotional ex votos as sites where the sacred and the erotic converge. Meanwhile, Makinson’s To the sugar on the strawberries fabricates an exquisite, time-bending masquerade of androgynous figures that slip between medieval folklore, sci-fi, and art history, inhabiting a liminal state between decadence and vigilance.
This tension between the surreal and the corporeal materializes sculpturally in Zsófia Keresztes’ Sprout and Remains of Tenderness, where glass mosaics and fabric flesh out a dualism between digital identity and physical embodiment. Similarly, Oda Iselin Sønderland’s melancholic watercolors disrupt linear narratives of emotional development, positioning the subconscious as a site where the logic of desire and memory fractures. Unifying these distinct yet interconnected gestures, the gallery’s softly sectioned white curtains stage a space where visibility and opacity, revelation and concealment, continuously slip through one another—like the very concept of viscosity itself.
