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Pepe Mar | My First 25,000 Years on Earth, David Castillo Gallery | 2024
David Castillo is proud to present My First 25,000 Years on Earth, a solo exhibition of new works by Pepe Mar. Imagine, if you will, a spiral, like the “spiral kiss” Mar referenced in a 2022 talk at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art[1]—at some points, the coils are adjacent to each other, nestled side-by-side. My First 25,000 Years on Earth is a large-scale Gesamtkunstwerk, and each work comprising it encompasses the spiral of Mar’s prismatic practice—its origins and its path forward. Most of them serve as poignant reflections on the artist’s history, reimagining the past and alchemizing the future into something entirely new. My First 25,000 Years on Earth, then, allows Mar to consider where he’s been as he enters a new era; the rest of us, thankfully, get to accompany him. Here is a macrocosm of Mar’s cosmic universe.
And it is cosmic. The show’s title evokes a spectral, science-fiction sensibility, a future in which 25,000 years is merely a life’s first quarter. It’s drawn from My First 300 Years on Earth, a 1988 painting by Julio Galán in which a boy’s glowing face floats at the center of a labyrinth, the maze’s lines converging at ocean waves, animals, stones. Galán, the Mexican Neo-Expressionist painter who oneirically referenced pre-Columbian cultures, Catholicism, and the inherent surrealism of the body (the way the body houses a soul), is Mar’s art ancestor, a divine guide. Mar’s 25,000 years are, more truthfully, 25 years—the 25 years he’s lived and worked in Miami, arriving here around 2000, enchanted by South Beach. The spirit of his queer ancestors echoes along those 22 blocks of pink sidewalks; Paprika, Mar’s alter-ego and recurring visual motif, was born on Washington Avenue, drawn on a napkin at Twist nightclub.
Mar is a miner—of his own subconscious (where Paprika lives); of thrift stores like Out of the Closet, a local queer safe haven; of museum collections, like the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, where he curated Tesoro, an exhibition he transformed into an artwork all its own—and now, of his own history. “With My First 25,000 Years on Earth, I’m looking back on all the eras of my work,” he shares. That mindful contemplation is evident everywhere, even the space’s structure: the radiant orange carpet, upon which 42,132 people walked at Myth and Magic, his recent retrospective at the Tampa Museum of Art; the Plexiglass shelves, repurposed from Tesoro. Mar’s practice of assemblage recasts the gallery—meaningfully located in the Design District, where he’s displayed work since becoming a Miamian—into a kind of collage. For Mar, everything is an assemblage.
The works in My First 25,000 Years on Earth were made between 2023 and 2024, many of them reviving Mar’s most seminal works. With Varla (2024), a collage featuring a found poster of the titular artist, Mar recalls both Varla herself—another art ancestor—and previous pieces commemorating her life. He paid homage to Varla (Craig Coleman), the writer, drag artist, and visual artist who’d lived in South Beach, several times, most notably in 2019 with Varla TV, an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach’s inaugural Meridians sector. Revival (2024), an ongoing and disarmingly clever project, consists of wooden vitrines housing miniature versions of Mar’s work: tiny paintings, tiny sculptures, brimming with simulacra. Alacran (2024), one of the artist’s signature assemblages, contains a piece of petrified wood from Tampa. He found it serendipitously, as Myth and Magic came to a close. “Both the wood and the work itself,” says Mar, “mark a new chapter, a rebirth, things to come.”
And of course, there is the ever-present Paprika, and their strange, cylindrical mouth. Here, Paprika is sketched on postcards and assembled into a figure with leather tentacles, sourced from chaps and jackets at Out of the Closet, with Peter Paul Rubens’s Medusa (1618) affixed to their chest. For the first time, rattan iterations of Paprika have been cast in bronze, a golden cornucopia of horns and tentacles and their little face. The centerpiece from which the exhibition takes its title is a massive 3D collage, spilling onto the viewer: plastic Buddhas, Mar’s cutout images of plumed birds and pre-Columbian statues, and two ceramic trinkets at the center. They look like eyes.
“A piece like this is an origin story for Paprika,” says Mar, “because that’s how it came to be—using collage made from fashion magazines, encyclopedias, miniature objects, all sorts of ephemera. I collected for over a year to feed this 3D collage.” The word feed is telling. Like all of Mar’s creations, Paprika is alive, growing, gazing at us. Like Mar himself, they have so many more stories to tell—another 25,000 years’ worth.
A scholarly book on the artist, published by Tampa Museum of Art, is to be released in early 2025 and includes essays by Larry Rinder, Evan Garza, Yuval Etgar, Amy Galpin, and Joanna Robotham. As part of the programming for My First 25,000 Years on Earth, kindly join us at the gallery for a talk between the artist & Evan Garza, Curator at MASS MoCA on November 13th.