Miguel Ángel Payano Jr.

Miguel Ángel Payano Jr.’s first solo exhibition with Unit London brings together a series of  multimedia artworks that interweave disciplines of painting, collage and relief sculpture.

A  portmanteau that blends the words limb and linguistics, the exhibition’s title highlights the unifying aspects of this body of work. Each artwork features limbs from both human and  natural worlds. In an almost trompe l’oeil effect, hands, feet and tree branches adorned with fruit protrude from the confines of each picture plane.

As well as peaches and monkeys, body parts have become visual synecdoches for the fully realised human figure throughout Payano’s practice. Universally recognisable, hands, arms, feet and legs are annotated ways of considering the wider human condition. Beginning his works with a single gesture, Payano will layer different imagery and materials until a portrait eventually emerges. Sometimes, he is influenced by the people around him, using moulds of his friends’ and family’s lips to create his peaches for example, but these portraits are never specific. Rather, they are an amalgamation of people that are part real and part imagined.

For some time, Payano has been using casts of his own hands in his artworks. At first, he considered his hands to be accessible tools, easily included in his compositions. However, after the artist’s Parkinson’s diagnosis, these casts have taken on new meaning. Frozen in specific gestures, the casts are a way for the artist to immobilise his hands, almost becoming a visual remedy for the tremors symptomatic of his diagnosis. Each of these works is imbued with a growing uncertainty as Payano wonders how long he will be able to produce such labour-intensive pieces. At the same time, the exhibition embodies Payano’s new mantra of  doing what you can while you still can. Ultimately, Limbguistics explores the macro and micro aspects of the human condition, blending the deeply personal with the more universal aspects of lived experience.

Miguel Ángel Payano Jr. (b. 1980) is an Afro-Caribbean American visual artist born in New York, USA. He completed a BA at Williams College in Chinese Language & Studio Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts (2003); an MFA in Oil Painting from Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (2008) and an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College, CUNY, NY (2020). Throughout his career, Payano has exhibited extensively with notable shows at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara in California and Ad-Diriyah Biennale in Saudi Arabia, Hauser & Wirth and Simon Lee, among others. In 2024, Payano’s work will be shown in a solo exhibition at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China. Recent solo exhibitions include Out From, Charles Moffett, New York, US (2023) and Sojourn Summits, Galleria Poggiali, Milano (2022).