“Ethan Cohen Gallery presents Ray Smith: Nepantla, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. At a juncture of polarizing identity politics, Smith’s exhibition is particularly poignant not only in its monumentality and virtuosity but also in the sensitivity he brings to each subject. Smith’s works are timely and highly personal yet, Smith’s paintings address concepts that transcend identity and resonate to the very core of the human condition. Simultaneously Smith’s approach to painting subverts the norms of American art history.

Organized less as a conventional gallery presentation and more in line with an institutional approach, the exhibition’s unique tenor is further compounded by the raw quality of Ethan Cohen’s cavernous new Chelsea gallery. The works on view are not limited to a current body of work, rather the exhibition was conceived around one of Smith’s most seminal paintings Guernimex III (La Olympiada, 1989-1990), which is set in dialog with Smith’s most recent monumental sculptures Lagrimas de Espuma/Foam Tears, 2014 – 2024 and Cocoon 2014 – 2024. The extent of the works included encompass five decades of paintings and sculptures and draw on loans from private collections with the aim of highlighting the breadth of Smith’s oeuvre while focusing on the specific concept of Nepantla.” — Ethan Cohen Gallery

The term was first used by the indigenous people of central Mexico, the Nahaus, in the Florentine Codex, which preserves the knowledge of the ilamatlācah or “wise old women”–

“Tlachichiquilco in tihuih in tinemih tlālticpac: nipa centlami, nipa centlami. In tlā nipa xiyāuh in tlā noceh nipa xiyāuh ōmpa tonhuetziz: zan tlanepantlah in huīlōhua in nemōhua.”

“We travel along a mountain ridge while we live on earth, an abyss yawning on either side. If you stray too far one way or the other, you will fall away. Only by keeping to the middle way does one walk on and live.”

Installation views of Ray Smith: Nepantla at Ethan Cohen Gallery, September 19 – November 7, 2024. Photos by Yao Zu Lu. Courtesy of Ray Smith Studio and Ethan Cohen Gallery.