Miguel Ángel Payano Jr., Limbguistics
Until 19 December 2023, Unit London
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. At the same time, Limbguistics draws on Payano’s transcontinental experience. Inspired by his Caribbean heritage, training in New England and decades spent in China, the artist’s work reflects an interest in different modes of communication. While speaking multiple languages and moving through different cultures, Payano has come to understand that language is not limited to structures of grammar and vocabulary, but is the medium of a culture, carrying with it more intangible values and traditions. Limbguistics aims to extend this vernacular to art and visual culture, creating a body of work that considers shared human experience.
For the first time, Payano brings together all the varying motifs of his practice, particularly peaches and monkeys. In China, where Payano has spent nearly half of his life, the peach and the monkey are widespread symbols often pictured together. The peach, associated with magic and mythology, appears in a number of fables and art forms to symbolise immortality, fertility and eros. Equally, the monkey plays a significant role in Chinese culture, appearing in the zodiac calendar and often representing intelligence, cunning and playful mischievousness.
For Payano, the furry and wrinkled surface of a peach’s skin lends itself to the image of a human mouth. The mouth is a prevalent motif in the artist’s work, who refers to these peach-mouth hybrids as “single-celled humans” or reduced versions of the human form that can be used in more extended visual metaphors. In this case, the peach-mouth does not only represent the human figure, but also ideas of language and communication. Equally, in artworks that blend painting and sculpture, monkeys rupture the boundaries of the canvas, grabbing or even breaking through the frames that attempt to box them in. For Payano, monkeys are also stand-ins for the human figure, appearing as a detached form of social commentary. In this sense, the artist is influenced by the popular eighteenth-century French art form, Singerie, in which monkeys are satirically pictured imitating human behaviour. The communion of different visual symbols aims to open a dialogue between multiple art histories, bridging a divide between seemingly disparate visual cultures.
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.