Aramis Gutierrez, Verdant Romps and the Pandemic, 2020
Over the last year, painter Aramis Gutierrez has worked with videographer Fernando Govea on a documentary about the “Orgy Paintings” series he began in 2016. For these large-scale works, which invoke nineteenth-century French Romanticism and Impressionism, Gutierrez invites friends to pose in erotic entanglements in various locations across Miami, including lush tropical gardens, luxury condos, and swimming pools. With the spread of COVID-19 both the paintings and the documentary have to come to a full stop. As social gatherings and physical contact became impossible, Gutierrez was forced to rethink his ways of working. Verdant Romps and the Pandemic (2020) sees the artist adjusting to new modes of working and, in turn, changing his artistic output. This digital commission acts as an addendum to––or a parenthesis within––the in-progress but indefinitely stalled documentary. It captures his experience of quarantine and the altered work and living processes that isolation and minimal contact entail.
Aramis Gutierrez is a painter based in Miami. He has had solo exhibitions at David Castillo Gallery, Miami; Spinello Projects, Miami; Big Pictures, Los Angeles; and Tile Blush, Miami. He has participated in group exhibitions at Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Orlando Museum of Art; DiverseWorks, Houston; and Vox Populi, Philadelphia. In 2013 he cofounded, along with artists Loriel Beltran and Domingo Castillo, the Miami artist-run gallery/collaborative GucciVuitton, later renamed VersaceVersaceVersace and then Noguchi Breton. GucciVuitton created a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in 2015. In 2017 Gutierrez cofounded the gallery Tile Blush with Jonathan Gonzalez and Fernanda Torcida in Miami.
ICA Miami’s Digital Commissions series is made possible by the Knight Foundation and expands the museum’s commitment to fostering artistic experimentation and commissioning new works, as well as engaging audiences with innovative artistic voices.