Through installations constructed in a variety of media ranging from glass and cedarwood to bread, velvet and foam, Carlos Reyes’ practice playfully softens the polarities separating fragility and monumentality. Reyes’ earlier works distil a sense of tenderness, often elegantly cast in orange glass yet trussed up with harsh metal armatures. Through the sensual fluidity and translucence of their forms, Reyes’ glass works threaten to liquidise and ooze onto the gallery floor. In recent installations, Reyes has displayed old treadmill belts – monuments to cyclicality, energy depletion and travel without destination – and used salvaged remnants to reassemble a Manhattan bathhouse and queer social space, recapturing a fragmented notion of the original space and exploring the contrast between absence and presence. Encapsulated by the porcupine quill found in one of Reyes’ glass works, painstakingly trapped in amber, his practice seeks to interrupt the cyclicality of time, and to use this paused moment to reflect on mass production, affection and sentimentality. ...
