La Casita Amarilla, a solo exhibition by Humberto Maldonado. Drawing from mythological, religious, and personal stories, Maldonado transforms Soft Times Gallery into a restorative yellow home that becomes a safe space for anyone who walks inside of it; a place where love never leaves; a place where the contradictions between the languages of kink and religious iconography are easily understood despite the absence of the spoken word. In La Casita Amarilla, Humberto Maldonado positions a diverse set of motifs and inanimate figures as the subjects of their visual narratives, constructing symbolic portraiture from eggs, pears, and serpents.
 
Situated within the mountains of San Joaquin Valley, Maldonado’s grandmother’s house appears as the humble residence of a multigenerational family. Yet, the tensions, stories, and traumas that traversed inside changed Maldonado forever. “You would look so beautiful crucified,” their grandmother would tell them when they kept their hair long. In many Central American Catholic traditions, being chosen to hang from a cross is an honorable affirmation of piety and devotion. Yet the artist could only imagine themself hanging off the cross, their wrists and ankles bulging from the compression of the ropes.  Propelled by metaphors and motifs, the works in this exhibition evoke the desires, tensions, and stories Maldonado expressed in their grandmother's house.

One of the most prominent motifs in the show is a red dining set on which the artist’s family last ate together. The ubiquitous structure of the red chair becomes central to Maldonado’s compositions, functioning as a frame in some paintings, as negative space in others, and as an everyday object in some. Instrumentalizing the power of perspective, some paintings in this solo exhibition point to a singular scene, shown from multiple perspectives, such as the paintings representing their family’s dining set. 

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La Casita Amarilla is a metaphor-driven solo exhibition that uses the languages of kink and religious iconography to develop a safe place within the yellow walls of Maldonado’s interior worlds.

Born 1993 into a Mexican migrant family, Humberto Maldonado is a figurative painter who has lived between Mexico and California. They earned a Bachelors in Art from California State University of Stanislaus in 2019. They currently live and work in San Francisco, CA. 

Press Release by Dr. Margarita Lila Rosa.

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