Commonwealth & Council presents Clown’s Pocket by Mark Flores & Nicolau Vergueiro. This is the last of three successive exhibitions that propose distinct collaborative approaches to shared exhibition theme and design. 

Within the ludic folds that a clown’s pocket may expose, geometry, portraiture, and the alphabet are confounded by formal cues that manifest and corrupt possible narratives into (imagined) objects and their platforms of display. As Mark Flores’ wooden geometrical sculptures incorporate paintings on stretched canvas as material, implicating their sides and backs in the restaging of representations, the letters from the alphabet guide the renditions of eclectic objects of desire in Nicolau Vergueiro’s framed paintings on paper. In both approaches, abstract and figurative compositional entryways repel and assimilate aspects of narratives – portraits of Old Hollywood actor Ramon Navarro counterposed with the poised hallucinatory geometric abstractions in Flores’ paintings, and the gamut of styles (Egyptiana, Art Nouveau, etc…) in Vergueiro’s abecedary, inspired by the mid 20th century architecture of Artacho Jurado. 

Rather than focusing on functional specifics, both works burgeon when these narratives are taken as loosened compositional and psychological lines of references. Undoing and reconstructing their codes of function and condition by a shift in a geared perspective – be it through assembling paintings to face one another (and at times not the viewer) or in the proposal of the letter ‘L’ as a high-concept tea set. The interplay between Flores’ structures of display and Vergueiro’s proposed environments, extrapolate the possibilities of a flexible terrain in which unexpected stratagems are pulled out from a pocket of arsenal.