Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present Signal Path, a solo exhibition of paintings by Luis Gispert. Featuring a new body of work, the exhibition marks a concentrated shift in practice: the theatrical staging and stylized vocabulary that have long defined his films, videos, and photography are reconstituted here as pure painterly signal, an abstract language in which form and light create architectural forms that echo sound systems.
Drawing on Surrealism’s idea of the unconscious as a self-running editing engine, endlessly splicing together unlikely collisions and visual non sequiturs, Gispert’s work has long built images through intentional disguise, performative persona, and a dry, self-aware bravado, staging them as ceremonially composed tableaux. The result carries a charged ambivalence, poised between tenderness and threat.
The paintings emerge from Gispert’s immersion in audio and hi-fi culture, and they behave like devices as much as images. What registers first is the sensation of sound without sound, an impression of vibration, created through chromatic intensity and the push-pull of density and air.
Color in these works is not descriptive; it is activating, so that the canvas reads as permanently incandescent. In this charged glow, the representational intention that anchored earlier projects is fragmented and ultimately replaced by wholly abstract compositions whose edgeless reach feels both infinite and immediate.
A notational language runs through the exhibition of hieroglyphic and circular forms, suspended in frozen moments within lattice structures that are simultaneously dense and delicate.
Together the works propose a speculative geography, like diagrammatic city blueprints or aerial schematics that trade places with an outer stellar settlement in a distant tropical oasis, or a dystopian future.
About Luis Gispert
Luis Gispert (b.1972, Jersey City, New Jersey) is a Cuban American artist whose work spans photography, sculpture, film, and painting. Across mediums, he has examined the aesthetics of subculture, aspiration, and value in American life, often bringing vernacular forms into dialogue with art history and questions of identity. Gispert received a BFA in film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University.
His work is held in more than twenty-five museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
