Erick Medel | El Mañana
September 13th - October 18th, 2025
Charlie James Gallery
Installation View @ the Gallery
969 Chung King Road
Opening: Saturday, September 13th | 5-8PM
(Via Charlie James Gallery) Medel’s medium is fiber – he “paints” with a sewing machine on dark, heavy gauge denim, intuitively selecting color from a wall-sized bank of threads. The deep denim support enhances color by contrast, lending Medel’s compositions a quiet luminosity. Denim also brings to the work its long association with labor and its origins as a sturdy fabric developed to protect the bodies of workers. More personally, denim recalls the protective wear used by the artist’s father in his work as a gardener. Denim provides a strong base for many layers of stitching, which lend depth and shading to the compositions – most apparent here in his portraits of the neighborhood’s animal denizens. This body of work also finds Medel experimenting with abstraction, transforming backgrounds into blocks of solid color that lock together like puzzle pieces. This development grew out of a deepening interest in the history of abstract figuration by artists such as Alice Neel and Noah Davis.
