Press Release - Golden Crucible by Yaxkin Fuentes Barrientos f
pt.2:
Golden Crucible
a solo exhibition by
Yaxkin Fuentes Barrientos
Opening Reception
Saturday, July 26th at 6pm
On view until
September 6, 2025
pt.2 Gallery
1523b Webster St.
Oakland, CA 94612
pt.2 is excited to announce Golden Crucible a solo exhibition by Yaxkin Fuentes Barrientos.
A soft landscape, bathed in blue. Diffused and in perpetual dusk--not quite day, not quite night.
Yaxkin Fuentes Barrientos’ paintings represent the space and time known as hypnagogia, the bridge (or purgatory) between the waking world and the ether of dreams and memories. But these dreams are not mere fantastical worlds where imaginations run wild. Dreams imitate life, and in turn memories imitate dreams. With every passing recall, an ever-so-slightly different lens is added, a new detail is lost or added, rendering the original source material obsolete. In this state of permanent hypnagogia captured forever on oil and canvas we can take a peek into what memories mean to oneself.
Yaxkin Fuentes Barrientos (2001) was born in California to immigrant parents. His early life was spent in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, whose abandoned mines, quarries, and 19th century ruins contributed greatly as inspiration for his illustrations, most notably in Mine Song. But rather than being mere stand-ins for gloom, Barrientos’ depictions of tunnels are familiar dens, almost womb-like.In Grand Oak Echo the foothills once more, featuring a gnarled oak and its tendril roots. These trees are emblems of the landscape, verdant oases towering over the golden grass who provide a cool respite from the dazzling-yet-unforgiving summer sun.
Another motif runs throughout the illustrations, though less front-and-center. Stacks of stones, whose teetering balance add to the omnipresent uneasiness. Long shadows, muted edges that diffuse the edges of what is and what isn’t reality. This dream-like state is the undercurrent even more present in Barrientos’ oil paintings, where his mastery of subtle natural light shines in childhood settings, recalled through dreams and memories on canvas. In one painting a figure hangs its head, lost in contemplation or recollectment. In another, a soft landscape at dusk is haunted by a looming, almost visceral stormcloud that is more akin to a cross section of a heart than the weather.
A silhouette bathed in blue, tending to plants in a greenhouse. A dollhouse. Stacks of firewood. A tree’s branches curling over the horizon. These vignettes offer a chance to reflect over what it means to even remember one’s own past. Is it a quantifiable history? Or does it get murkier with every recollection?
Salvador Dali once claimed that to draw inspiration for new paintings, he would fall asleep in a chair holding a spoon. Just as he would fall asleep, the spoon would fall out of his hand and hit the floor, waking him from his blurred line between the waking world and the nonsensical mess of dreams. This state is often called hypnagogia, and in this realm is where one can attempt lucid dreaming. One can only guess whether one - or all - of the mysterious silent figures are tourists hailing from the artist’s own subconscious, wading in ponds, running through a forest, and coming to terms with the past while finding new ways to express it.
Text by Erne N. Fuentes