Sandra Cinto: Constructed Happiness: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

May 25 - July 2, 1999
Installation Views
Press release

Bonakdar Jancou Gallery is pleased to present “Constructed Happiness,” Sandra Cinto’s first one-person exhibition outside of Brazil.  Creating works of sculpture, painting, drawing and photography, Sandra Cinto dissolves the boundaries between fantasy and reality and dissolutes the limits of physical objects in the world of reality.   The predominant means employed to achieve this end is an exquisite style of drawing that incorporates repeated, surreal and dreamlike image-motifs.  These drawings may be presented as independent works, or applied to the surface of sculptural objects and walls as part of a larger installation, or photographed after being applied to parts of the artist’s body.  The artist’s sculptural objects are also culled from the realm of fantasy and memory, objects that are familiar yet fabricated with subtle alterations and loaded with psychological resonance. 

Created with specific attention to the gallery’s architecture, “Constructed Happiness” consists of three sequential environments, each corresponding to a particular space in the gallery.   The gallery walls and the sculptural objects have been painted a single uniform color, described by the artist as  “something between a luminous, happy, light and hopeful color and one that reminds me of hunger, venom, delirium and death.” (Cinto)  Besides creating a single, limitless  canvas upon which the artist can draw, the scheme also suggests a movement outside of reality and into the membrane of an alternate realm of experience.