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Javier Manrique and Danny Rosales

We initially considered a two-person exhibition featuring Danny Rosales and Javier Manrique due to their aesthetic compatibility. Beyond that surface connection, both artists capture an ephemeral sense of escape from concrete boundaries, using materials with shared vigor and vitality.

Living in San Francisco Bay Area, where construction sites are ubiquitous, Rosales leveraged his background in the building crafts to transform raw building supplies into sculptures. Manrique followed a more traditional path, studying at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking in Mexico City before earning his degree at the San Francisco Art Institute.

In Manrique’s abstract landscape paintings, the application suggests paint splashing and dripping beyond the canvas. As he describes it, "...space is stripped of its representative qualities and its components are synthesized into fields of color."

Similarly, Rosales uses heavy construction materials—typically associated with weight and stability—to build upward-reaching sculptures. He cites Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles as one of his primary inspiration, noting, "The idea of building a tower to the sky from scrap steel amazed me and has captured my imagination ever since."