Melvino Garretti: Obsession, Works 2005–2026: New York

Melvino Garretti: Obsession, Works 2005–2026 marks American artist Melvino Garretti’s first solo presentation with Sebastian Gladstone Gallery in New York. Bringing together wall-based three-dimensional works, mixed-media ceramics, and sculptures, the exhibition introduces a world somewhere between the familiar and the fantastical. Spanning two decades, the works on view reveal an artist whose practice moves freely between materials, allowing everyday objects to take on new forms, personalities, and lives. Nothing is necessarily what it was, and nothing must remain what it has become.

In A vision in my yard to find the crossroads, who and what's waiting (2023), a painted canvas extends into the viewer's space through an assemblage of found textiles, wood, a chair back, a glove, a rubber tire, ceramic elements, and cigar stubs. Figures emerge among these everyday possessions, their bodies assembled from objects that appear to have wandered into the composition from different corners of the artist's life. An eye peers outward. A glove gestures toward an unknown destination. A tire suggests the possibility of movement. What begins in the familiar surroundings of a yard becomes a place of unexpected encounters. Domestic space becomes visionary space.

For Garretti, an object's usefulness does not end when it leaves its original setting. Neither entirely disguised nor confined to their former purposes, these materials participate in another story, one that may continue changing long after the work first takes shape.

In Who Knows (2005), cloth, wood, acrylic, a branch, and sequins come together in a standing figure covered in colorful patterns. An Untitled ceramic work from 2008 introduces another character, its multiple eyes and antler-like features emerging from glazed clay and vintage textiles. Familiar materials assume unfamiliar configurations. These figures seem caught mid-dance, as though we have interrupted a gathering already underway. Who are they? Where have they come from? Their stories extend beyond what we can see, as the artist invites us to wander a little further into their world.

Never confining himself to a single medium, Garretti has moved between ceramics, painting, drawing, sculpture, and assemblage throughout his career. His involvement with Studio Watts Workshop in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned his MFA in 1978, form part of this multidisciplinary history. Like jazz musicians such as Thelonious Monk, whose unmistakable sound emerged from an individual approach to composition and improvisation, Garretti continues to pursue a visual language distinctly his own.

“As I hold on to things, a lot of times, the pieces themselves go take a journey,” Garretti explains. There is a certain obsession in holding on, returning to works made decades earlier to discover what else they might become. A work made decades ago might be revisited, refurbished, or assembled into something new. Even its title may change as the work develops. Like the objects that populate his studio, the artworks themselves are allowed to have more than one life.

Perhaps that is the pleasure of entering Garretti's world. An ordinary possession becomes a character, a drawing develops into a sculpture, and something once considered finished begins again.

Text by Taylor Bythewood-Porter, curator and writer based in Los Angeles.