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Louis Buhl & Co. is proud to announce Fountain of Youth, a new edition with Chicago-based artist Carlos Rolón. The artist has been recognized for his elaborately crafted paintings, ornate sculptures and works that come out of American, Latino and uniquely based subcultures. His studio practice investigates pop culture, craft, ritual, beauty and its relationship to art history, subculture, appropriation and the institution. As a first-generation immigrant of Puerto Rican descent, the artist creates objects questioning the concept of luxury and craft making to explore questions of identity, integration and aspiration. His work also represents a detailed examination of curiosity and the process of art making and the cultures surrounding this. The artist often channels this approach with site-specific installation work, vivid large-scale paintings and ornate sculptures in various materials expanding on ideas of self-reflection and imagined luxury. The works ultimately produce a hybrid language of social practice, painting and sculpture inviting the viewer to engage in discourse and discussion. 


Rolón creates photorealistic oil paintings on a background of 24-karat gold leaf, which connects to the Spanish colonial discovery of gold in Puerto Rico and the Gulf of Mexico in the early 1500s. Exhaustive looting required the removal of tropical flora and vegetation in order to access the riches, and over time 4 million euros in gold was extracted. The edition reference this ravaging of natural resources, and as such they manifest the same complex histories - as well as dichotomies -  that Rolón is known for: “These works represent my reimagined replacement of the natural beauty that lived and breathed atop the very mineral that brought wealth and abundance to colonizing cultures. They generate a sense of hope and beauty - as well as melancholic notes from the past - and contrast the ideas of nature and territory.” - Carlos Rolón

Carlos Rolón

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