Hidrante is pleased to present Cáscaras II, by Culeybo, on view from May 23rd to July 4th.

In Cáscaras II, Culeybo explores ideas of resilience, perception, and the corrosive affects of American mass media on Puerto Rican culture by drawing from found imagery and advertising. Culeybo pokes fun at portrait and representation art genres, inviting us to a space of inclusivity and diversity that allows us to explore identities beyond the standard social spectrums through a series of paintings that portray dogs with orthodontic braces, the cheapening of the erotic in advertising, and the devaluation of landscape as an object of consumption. The artist plays with the tension between protection and vulnerability, layering oil paintings under hard resin shells to probe at the layers that make up our ideas of beauty.

Culeybo's Perridientes: una vida sin temor al triunfo series plays with the portraiture genre's association with beauty and conformity. The series departs from a taken-to-the-extreme exploration of the 2010 "Doggie dentures" advertising campaign, published by TBWA in the United States and Puerto Rico for Dentastix and Pedigree. Juxtaposing oil on panel paintings of vicious-looking attack dogs under carved bas-relief resin panels of laughing, perfect-toothed individuals, Culeybo's absurd canine portraits draw our attention to our contemporary anthropocentrism of perrihijos and the imposition of human beauty standards on them. Part of a larger, 32-piece series, Perridientes: una vida sin temor al triunfo also speaks to humans' desire for individuality and ideal beauty, with each piece framed within a tooth-shaped frame, each perfectly white, covered in silver or gold, or bejeweled with a gem.

In SVD Panorama, Culeybo engages with the genre of landscape painting, depicting his fragmented ethereal version of Escambron Beach in San Juan, which he then interferes with strings of cast resin abacus beads. This becomes a double commentary about the context of the Escambron site and recent real estate speculation in Puerto Rico. The individual works, Parcelas 1 through 10, are available as lots, much like ocean front property in general. At the same time, the public land surrounding Escambron is being transferred for development as a parking space for the Normandie hotel renovation project. His introduction of the abacus beads calls to mind the calculation behind real estate speculation and the lane rows of Olympic swimming pools or the safety swimming zone separator found on beaches, suggesting the delimitations of land and water in service of private property and spaces.

The work of Culeybo (Sebastián Gutiérrez; b. 1996, Gurabo, PR) focuses on the influence of identity on personal behavior and lust as a protagonist in public settings, operating within the matrix of our relationship between the public and private in both the individual and the material. The subject stems primarily from personal development, manifested in everyday coexistence with strangers and the intersections between beauty, class, and appearance. Culeybo draws from diverse sources to create pieces that reveal contrasting ideas learned through the intrinsic friction contained in his work and the layers that mediate our relation between the covetable and the loathsome.