NADA House 2023

“Portals,” by Francisco Donoso, is a site-responsive installation of mixed-media paintings made on mylar, which are mounted on acrylic plexiglass supports that are shaped in forms inspired by the negative space of the chain-link fence. The shaped paintings are mounted to the walls backed with a wooden support that allows the pieces to “float” an inch off the wall, allowing for a subtle glow of color to surround each work, which reflects off the backs of the works. The shaped works, made in multiple sizes, are arranged in a sweeping composition that references both micro and macro life-forms, from the atomic scale to the cosmos. Donoso collapses simplistic binaries of here/there, in/out by creating what feels like celestial and terrestrial at the same time.

“Portals,” is situated within Donoso’s ongoing exploration of the fencescape, the psychic landscape of his interiority as a recipient of DACA, originally from Ecuador, but raised and residing in the US (Miami/NYC). Donoso uses the cyclone fence (chain-link) to take viewers beyond common assumptions about migration and borders, introducing us to a multiverse of experiences arising from the conditions of being undocumented in the United States today. Aesthetically, the chain-link fence has become the contemporary symbol of separation. In “Portals,” the chain link fence transcends its contemporary connotations and becomes gestural, painterly, playful, abstract, phantom, diffused, and invisibilized while evident.

Through “Portals,” Donoso materializes the parts of the chain-link fence that are not the limiting barrier itself, but the diamond-shaped window created by the wire. Each piece in the overall installation becomes a psychedelic portal that invites the viewer to traverse the psychological limitations of borders towards a liberated interiority.

The negative spaces created between the edges of the portals not only appear as the chain-link fence, but through the gestural abstraction of the shapes, they also recall waterways, veins and interconnected pathways- that point towards the invisibilized journeys taken in migration, both physical and psychological. The portals become an archipelago of islands, each one a memoryscape, fencescape and site for undocumented futurity.