Desnivel Gallery is proud to present EN EL KIOSKO, a presentation of new paintings by Juan Jose Heredia. EN EL KIOSKO will be on view at Village Gourmet Grocery, part of Desnivel’s ongoing, nomadic exploration of uniquely accessible locations. 

Heredia was born in North Miami, a Caribbean neighborhood where you’ll still find family-owned businesses and murals on pink-and-beige stucco, mere miles from the deceptively placid waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Despite the rest of the city’s rapid overdevelopment, North Miami remains its own singular enclave; Heredia drew inspiration from the dynamism of this place and the waters surrounding it. He’s been surfing nearly as long as he’s been drawing; his images have an aquatic and hypnagogic quality—a movement not unlike the sort your body feels after spending too many hours in the ocean, a haziness that mirrors the phosphene shapes you might see while drifting to sleep. He describes being in the ocean as a wordless, meditative space, one that offers him “windows—and imagine the windows I get to see: the sun doing something radical, the horizon changing the way your own sense of gravity feels. When you’re surfing, you’re often just staring into things.” 

For the artist, painting is also about looking, and like the ocean, the experience becomes a place: “The only place you can go and deal with color, or with the temperature of being human.” He often works on fabric, preferring soft materials for the way they allow colors to melt and saturate (Heredia typically uses a blend of dyes, oils, and acrylics). The figures blur, legible but undulating. In “Bunny ears of absence,” (2024), one of the most remarkable paintings in the show, painted on canvas burlap; the titular ears adorn a feminine figure’s head, a flash of bubblegum-pink in a sea of red, turquoise, and dandelion-yellow. There are other bodies, too, and faces emerging into—or perhaps disappearing— from sight. These works “are not taut, not stretched, not plasticized, not turned into a hard material,” Heredia shares. “I want them to have a loose-ended softness.” They seem edgeless, and endless. 

“Anemone Cerberus” (2024) is even murkier, a pool of maroons and greens and browns, a soil-toned foil to the mostly sunny paintings accompanying it. There’s a prominent shape on its right side—something winged or unfurling. A sharp white cloud gives way to magenta, then to a semicircle of sparse lines, fanned outward. Giving into pareidolia, one might see a hummingbird, or an alate, feathered woman, alighting toward and beyond the burlap’s margins. Heredia shares that he finds himself painting “reoccurring symbols that show the duality of dying and blooming; when you combine them, there is a narrative quality.” The narratives are never planned. Heredia approaches his practice the way he steps into the water, quiet and happily unsure (sometimes, he sets up his fabrics on the sand). What’s deliberate is his desire to make viewers look, the way he looks. If touching public art was acceptable, Heredia would no doubt permit it, particularly these tactile pieces. “The IQ of a human being is very high when it comes to fabric, because it’s usually against you,” he says. To behold Heredia’s horizons is to accept an invitation—to find your own window, and get closer.

—Monica Uszerowicz

Exhibition text based on a phone call conversation between the artist and writer in May of 2025.