Material 2025
Danie Cansino
Material Art Fair 2025
booth b24
february 6 - 9, 2025
For Material Art Fair 2025, Charlie James Gallery is proud to present Punto de Vista, a solo exhibition of works by Los Angeles artist Danie Cansino that invites the viewer to inhabit the artist’s unique perspective. Brightly-lit scenes emerge from shadowed frames like first-person memories, tangling the viewer into the artist’s own gaze. The Material presentation will include a group of paintings on non-traditional supports, including Mexican serape and leather, as well as compositions on paper, panel, and mirror. Cansino’s paintings are populated by women at work and at leisure, and often focus on hands – instruments of labor but also of beauty, Cansino’s painted hands get things done while sporting long, elegant nails. The works celebrate the pride and independence of women who have bucked convention by finding success in male-dominated fields, beginning with the artist’s own grandmother, as well as their perseverance in the face of a declining political climate.
Alchemy features two tattooed, long-nailed hands pulling a pint. This painting pays homage to the artist’s cousin who works as a brewmaster, a position occupied by very few women. Cansino captures the elegance and precision of the pour, imbuing the act with a feminine strength. A fierce self-possession also appears in Bella Doña, whose amber-lit figure boldly takes up space in a world that is not always welcoming to powerful Chicanas. Throughout, Cansino reiterates the idea of Puedo Hacerlo – a can-do attitude that encompasses everything from putting on your own jewelry to sharking at the pool tables – with characteristic Baroque drama and detail.
Cansino’s paintings on serape and leather are a unique innovation in the medium. Traditional painting supports consist of textile – usually canvas or linen – stretched to a frame and trimmed. Cansino complicates this history by opting for serape in place of canvas, stretching the traditional Mexican textile and leaving the excess fabric to hang off the frame. Similarly, the leather alludes to a history of Mexican craft that stretches back for hundreds of years. In this way, the blankets and leather serve as support for the picture plane while maintaining their status as objects in the world, a non-neutral ground for the paintings to occupy.
Another signature medium for Cansino brings her tattooing practice directly into the work by using ballpoint ink and a tattoo gun to create deftly shaded pointillist drawings on paper. Work Boots pays homage to her grandmother, a factory worker at a time when few women were. In this self-portrait, the artist laces her own work boots, protection against a world increasingly hostile to women and communities of color. The masterful realism that Cansino is able to achieve with the ballpoint works has its roots in classic West Coast Chicano tattoo styles, a mode she expands into personal stories and landscapes.
Two etched mirror works round out the presentation. Cansino created these by “drawing” on mirror with a dremel, a process reminiscent of the labor of tattooing. The technique shows up in the elaborately etched windows of lowrider culture, but also in kitsch trinkets common in Mexican-American households, The image of the Virgin Mary evokes a kind of “abuelita” aesthetic that calls to mind the homes of loved ones, here transposed onto a rounded hanging mirror that reflects the viewer alongside the visage of the saint. As with the ink on paper drawings, Cansino achieves an incredible realism via subtle shading and slight gradations in etched tone.
VENUE
Expo Reforma (MAP)
Av. Morelos 67
Col. Juárez, Del. Cuauhtémoc
CDMX 06600
Mexico
THE FAIR
February 6th – 9th, 2025
Thursday, February 6th
Invited: First Look, 12 – 2PM (VIP)
Invited: Private View, 2 – 5PM (VIP)
Grand Opening, 5 – 8PM (Open to the public)
Friday, February 7th, 12 – 8PM
Saturday, February 8th, 12 – 8PM
Sunday, February 9th, 12 – 7PM
