Opens Friday, November 6th, 6pm – 9pm
On View November 6th – 29th
Gallery hours: Saturday & Sunday 2pm – 6pm or by appointment
Pink Noise Projects is pleased to present Manually Breathing, A Solo Exhibition by Puerto Rico based artist Jotham Malavé.
Manually Breathing reflects on the nature of contemporary life in Puerto Rico, where the changing landscapes and scarcity of essential resources like electricity, water, and housing, fuel communal anxiety while echoing global narratives. The title Manually Breathing references to the shift between automatic and conscious breathing which can be driven by anxiety or deep concentration. Malave’s new body of work explores these ideas of contradiction between voluntary and involuntary.
This is Malavé’s first solo show in the United States. A selection of works from the show are part of a larger series titled Simulacra. In these works Malave explores the dichotomy of reality and simulation within painting. As a fan of science fiction, philosophy, video games, and music, Malavé builds an alternate world within his paintings where archetypes embody the fragmented lived experience in the nonsensical Caribbean colonial territory of Puerto Rico. Similar to Foucault’s Of Other Spaces, painting becomes a mirror of the real world, a window into narratives that are otherwise obscured by the fetishized views of the Caribbean. These dark nightscapes and liminal ambiguous narratives feed into the magical realism of everyday life in rural Puerto Rico.
Jotham Malavé Maldonado is a Puerto Rican painter and professor at the School of Fine Arts and Design of San Juan, PR. He graduated from PAFA’s MFA program in 2019 and received the Woodmere Art Museum Purchase Prize Permanent Collection and the Judith McGregor Caldwell Purchase Prize for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Permanent Collection. Malave also taught figure drawing and figure painting at the University of Pennsylvania and Fleisher Art Memorial from 2019 to 2023. After 6 years in Philly, he returned to Puerto Rico in 2023 and is part of the art residency program “Casitas de artistas de Bayamón”, where he currently lives and works. His work explores political themes tied to everyday life intertwined with science fiction, art history, and music.
