56 HENRY is pleased to announce My Imaginary Friends Are New in Town, the first US solo exhibition by Costa Rican artist Fabrizio Arrieta. The exhibition will be on view February 8 through March 19, 2022.

My Imaginary Friends Are New in Town presents seven paintings, all made in 2021, featuring the artist’s characteristic alien-like creatures. The central work, El Secreto de la Verdad (The Secret of Truth), belongs to a group of large-scale paintings depicting arrangements of figures based on photographs drawn from fashion or lifestyle magazines. These images are transformed in a digital process and then re-constructed in acrylic paint. The altered figures are no longer identifiable but transformed into abstract configurations. We encounter amorphous superimposed shapes and lines, enlarged bodies, and elongated arms and legs. These disjointed personages are no longer polished and glamorous but rather menacing, offensive, eerie—and, crucially, anonymous. 

The other six canvases are smaller, more intense, close-up depictions of individual faces. They are portraits, but of whom, we do not know. They exemplify the rootedness of the artist’s practice in careful study of the Western art historical canon. We see traces of Constructivism, German Expressionism, Surrealism, and more, combined into a patchwork of styles: one for the nose, another for the eyes, yet another for the neck, all morphed together in an uncanny yet absorbing fantasy. It is as if Arrieta is gaining his artistic and intellectual comprehension of the history of painting through corporeal experience. His play with depth, dimension, and indeed identity itself bends reality into an illusion and suggests a highly ambiguous relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. Our here and now is represented by fusing hundreds of splinters and fragments of reality into new forms and shapes, bizarre, perhaps even disturbing, but also beautiful and seductive.

Fabrizio Arrieta (b. 1982, San José, Costa Rica) lives and works in San José. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including solo presentations at Hoffmann + Maler + Wallenberg, Nice; Diablo Rosso, Panamá; Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, San José, Costa Rica; and group exhibitions at Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong; and the Bienal Internacional de Asunción, Paraguay, among many others.