A painter by training, Benjamin Cabral makes work that is largely autobiographical, creating an honest yet inherently unreliable self-portrait. Cabral’s recent paintings are entirely encrusted with beads and rhinestones. They are conceived digitally, and the pixels are then transferred to the panel through a meditative application of beads. These works examine the intersections of trauma and nostalgia, joy and sorrow, and the digital and the analog. Cabral also creates sculptural works intended to be static performers engaging with the viewer.

Suspended between recognizable forms and dreamt abstraction, my paintings rely on their physical surface to anchor themselves within a larger structure of color, texture, and symbol. Motifs often repeat, reflecting as mirages of themselves, tracing a bumpy line connecting the work and the images within it. The surfaces inform the images—leaving room for autonomy within the paintings, as if they’ve constructed themselves. I’m interested in the parallels between physical material and a sense of clarity and misunderstanding.

My paintings are both real and imagined, rooted within my memories of adolescence. I mythologize my past in my present through paint. The images in my paintings are intimate glimpses of everyday events, with characters that are both vulnerable and playful.

Through a graphic style and use of vivid colors, these commonplace scenes are exaggerated while still capturing distinct human emotions. These moments are specific yet universal, and offer a humorous approach to dealing with relatable memories, fears, and desires.

Nick Schleicher’s work ranges from color field abstractions to sculptural forms inspired by domestic display. Most recently, his practice investigates the relationship between object, painting, sculpture, and void. His latest series of shaped canvases dissolves the exactness of hardline abstraction and overtly rejects clinical crispness in pursuit of something more human. Schleicher’s practice embraces ambiguity; he utilizes abstraction as a vehicle for projection and engages with the empathetic potential of minimalism.

My work is a response to what I see, and what I see is different from what you see. I explore the complexities of sightlessness in a sight-driven world. Squinting through the clutter and clamor of reality, my paintings reflect the whimsy and absurdity of our post-cultural landscape framed through a tinted comedic lens. Influenced by the chaos occurring in cartoons—a limitless universe without precaution or repercussion—I find logic in punchlines. Gags such as anvils dropping, painted faux tunnels, and exploding pianos inform my decision making when it comes to making a gesture.

These paintings are from a series that combine regional subject matter (crime stories, landscapes, portraits) with paintings from the past. My focus is on the settings, people, and architecture I grew up around.

The overwhelming weight that one experiences while being in a state of emptiness is contradictory. How can one feel completely overwhelmed while existing in the rawness of desolation? The journey of deciphering emptiness as human experience has left me with the ungraspable obscurity of its identity: a condition that we all share yet cannot concretely articulate. I create bodies that demand attention, bodies that seduce the viewer into seeing them as artifacts of the concealed. Opulent and tragic monuments that commemorate what we cannot express with words.

Debo Mouloudji is a French-born artist whose work focuses on the hierophany of the flesh. Mouloudji always paints the model from life. It is a cardinal principle in her practice, as her portraits are emanations of the temporal and eternal. For her, painting is the binding of energy and time into form. Influenced by mythology, oneness, and anxiety in regard to our mortal existence, it is Mouloudji’s current and future hope to capture the infinite within that which is carnally bound.

Having spent hundreds of hours as a passenger driving through Midwest landscapes, I am interested in reorganizing these scenes to tell small poems. Through reorganization and abbreviation, I discover how to understand the image, really breaking it down to its bare bones. My flat and patterned base style is heavily inspired by the look of world-building in video games, such as Animal Crossing, Super Mario, and The Sims—games that reference our real world, while snapping to the grid of the magical, digital space.

My work revolves around narratives that reflect nostalgia and black culture. Each painting serves as a repository preserving our existence. The combination of color and scale helps figures appear regal, commanding of attention. I want viewers to make connections with my portraits as if they knew the figures personally. By applying blues, purples, and reds as undertones for skin color, or painting the eyelids a bright color to accentuate a particular mood, I’m conveying a sense of presence and diversity found within black people.