Dalton Gata
La Fiesta y Las Fieras

THE PARTY AND THE BEASTS

Dalton Gata

Dalton Gata’s paintings complicate the usual encounter between subject and landscape in order to transgress portraiture as a genre. His protagonists, beautified beyond what is normally and arbitrarily defined as ‘natural,’ are always surrounded by impossible, similarly artificial landscapes: glittery, endless oceans, alien wastelands, utterly dysfunctional brutalist structures. Gata doesn’t limit himself to depicting the human—or the quasi-human—,he also turns his eye to botanical subjects. It is never about faithful representation, like the colonial catalogs of flora and fauna, no, just like his human-animal chimeras, his plants are in a state of mutant florescence: fruits that give birth to other fruits, branches growing maracas, cacti of disorienting proportions—a show of flamboyant, psychedelic exuberance.

Gata’s creatures appear not only aware, but defiant of that tangled knot—what Sylvia Wynter describes as the ‘symbolic code of life/death’—from which the highly surveilled, lethal, and arbitrary borders that justify sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and speciesism emerge. Gata’s beings understand this perfectly, and luckily, they know a couple tricks: they shimmy a little and suddenly the knot comes loose, they’re free, gazing optimistically at a new horizon, or confronting the viewer with a smile, “So when are yougoing to let go?” His beasts beckon us to their hybrid confines, their overlapping categories confront us with the monstrous that is simultaneously beautiful.

The chimeras pose—they know they are being watched, professionally lit. They’re used to the judgmental, envious gaze of the normative eye, and they even expect it: they adorn and arrange themselves to welcome it. They’re the stars of their own mythological fashion editorial. They embody that photographic, editorial quality in Gata’s painterly eye: the defiant stare of his subjects, the sharpness and the hyper-saturated colors align more with the poetic yet revindicating fashion imagery of Tyler Mitchell, Deana Lawson, or Omar Victor Diop, than with the art historical, white, canon.

It’s in that against-the-grain spirit that the party and its dislocations become important as well—a break for mutual celebration, for the euphoria of escapism and pleasure, of postponing the rigor of existence. And perhaps because occasional liberation doesn’t guarantee utopia, the party here is not a placeholder for the promised land: it involves chaos, sweat, pleasure, frenzy, and risk. In Gata’s creation, ruin appears as the counterpart to fantasy: his still lifes wear lively drag, they are memento moriof Caribbean exuberance. It’s a lavish, island ruin—surrounded by the sea’s corrosive breeze, by humidity that eats away at yellowing walls, by flesh shining with salty sweat. These works also aim to evoke an itinerant existence, the ordinary but no less heavy burdens of constant relocation, of always carrying one’s own instability, even if it goes hand in hand with the will to beautify one’s surroundings, to give a quick “manita de gato” (a touch-up) to what we know is not our own—the vulnerable beauty one snatches from that which doesn’t seem willing to cooperate.

Gata sublimates his lived experience in these fantastic compositions—within them are traces of his intimacy, of his scrolling, of his lovers, his recent past, the friendships and loved ones that rescued his boat from the high seas of precarity, that harbored his imagination. They are migrant beings, revelers, inhabitants of a kitsch domesticity—beasts of the night, of the beach, and of the future. The beast-works accompany one another—they make up their own world: more fabulous, more glamorous, one day maybe possible.

Gaby Cepeda

TEXTO CURATORIAL
De la cotidianidad privada, lxs cuerpxs y el amor.
Notas sobre Adolfo Riestra
Por 
Mauricio Marcin
TEXTO
Adolfo Riestra: fragmentos escogidos
Por 
Abraham Cruzvillegas
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MAIN FLOOR
Dalton Gata
The Guardian of the Magic Fruit, 2025
Acrylic on cotton-canvas linen
60 1/4 x 50 x 2 in
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Dalton Gata
I Lost My Earring Last Night, 2025
Acrylic on cotton-canvas linen
70 1/8 x 90 2 in
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Dalton Gata
La Fiesta y Las Fieras, 2025
Acrylic on canvas
Diptych: 60 x 100 x 2 in (each) - 60 x 200 x 2 in (total)
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Dalton Gata
Lucía de la Habana, 2025
Bronze
88 5/8 x 74 3/4 x 25 5/8 in
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Dalton Gata
Muro del placer, 2023
Acrylic on linen
25 x 50 x 2 in
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Dalton Gata
El frutero, 2025
Acrylic on cotton-canvas linen
70 1/8 x 90 x 2 in
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Dalton Gata
Los Optimistas, 2025
Acrylic on cotton-canvas linen
70 1/8 x 90 x 2 in
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Dalton Gata
Exploring Places for a Peaceful Life, 2025
Acrylic on cotton-canvas linen
70 1/8 x 50 x 2 in
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FIRST FLOOR
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