Sandra Cinto: Cosmic Garden II

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present Cosmic Garden II, Sandra Cinto’s first exhibition at the gallery in Los Angeles, on view February 6 through April 3, 2021. This is the artist’s eighth exhibition with Tanya Bonakdar. Comprising fifteen new canvases, an immersive wall-to-wall installation and a participatory postcard project, the exhibition continues the artist’s Cosmic Garden series, which was originally conceived for her solo presentation at Fondation Hermès in Tokyo in 2020. 

Since the early 1990s, Sandra Cinto has developed a rich vocabulary of symbols and lines to create lyrical landscapes and narratives that hover between fantasy and reality. Using drawing as her point of departure, the artist renders intricate and mesmerizing seascapes, rainstorms, and celestial skies that frequently engage with the surrounding architecture to create seemingly weightless, immersive environments. Evoking stories of human hardship and redemption, Cinto's fantastical imagery serves as a metaphor for the human odyssey, while also pushing the limits and possibilities of drawing. 

The new paintings on view map a journey from day to night, with hues of blue that vary from light to dark and finely detailed motifs that represent the cosmic energy of the universe. The main room of the gallery features discrete canvases from the Cosmic Garden series with a lighter, daytime palette as well as two painted wooden objects in the form of books. In the rear room at the gallery, nine large canvases from the series Cosmic Garden/Nocturnal are presented as a fully immersive environment, emulating the enveloping qualities of the starry night sky. As the viewer moves throughout the gallery space, these tonal variations create a rhythmic sense of movement within the depicted landscapes and present a poetic reflection on the passage of time. 

For the front room of the gallery, where a single canvas is also on view, Cinto has created an interactive work that celebrates drawing as a means of connection, an opportunity for intimate exchange in our otherwise hyper-digitized world. The viewer is invited to sit at a wooden table with a chair, lamp, pencils and postcards made by Cinto. Guests can draw or write to anyone of their choosing and leave the finished card in the wooden deposit box, which the gallery will mail out throughout the course of the exhibition. Each pencil is inscribed with the phrase “draw with love,” and is meant as a gift for visitors to take with them. For Cinto, the pleasure and power of drawing is essential. In our present time of isolation and remote communication, it is the trace of touch that has the power to bring together visitors, their chosen recipients and the artist in a meaningful meditation on the cosmos.