The Burden of Words: Gold Leaf Works

José Vincench

The Burden of Words: Gold Leaf Works

September 12 – October 11, 2025

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel

Hammerstrasse 121, Basel 4057, Switzerland

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel is pleased to present The Burden of Words: Gold Leaf Works, José Vincench’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring gold leaf paintings created between 2018 and 2025. An opening reception will be held on Friday, September 12, from 5 - 7 pm.

For over three decades, José Vincench has forged a practice anchored in four pillars —Context, Religion, Text, and Abstraction — each interwoven to visualize his life amid Cuba’s complexities, contradictions, and curtailed freedoms. Abstraction, far from a mere aesthetic pursuit, emerges as a subversive gesture: a tool to engage social issues, synthesize history through words, and navigate ethical dilemmas without succumbing to stereotypes. As Vincench articulates, it fosters an inclusive, universal dialogue, balancing the intellectual and spiritual while reflecting on the artist’s role in society. This exhibition delves into the tension between

speaking and silence, transforming charged rhetoric into poetic abstractions that critique symbolic domination under authoritarianism.

Central to Vincench’s language is 22k gold leaf, a material of profound paradox — sacred and transcendent, yet emblematic of power, economy, and rejected capitalism. Critic Donald Kuspit describes it as a “peculiarly abstract material, a sort of immaterial material like light,” bending illumination to expose societal absurdities. In these works, gold’s malleability and luminosity create negative dialectics, holding irreconcilable opposites: socialist idealism versus global capital, gesture versus inscription. Vincench deconstructs politically laden words — such as

Oposición (interrogating resistance) and Confundido 4 (highlighting disorientation), alongside terms like Escoria and Nepotismo in the Gold Abstraction Series exploring paradoxes of power and societal decay, and Plebiscito (atomizing democratic consultation) in a commanding large-scale canvas — into idiosyncratic geometries. Echoing Latin American abstraction movements of the 1950s (e.g., Los Once in Cuba, Madi in Argentina), these forms atomize concepts within sensorial gold fields, ironically rendering human dramas as decorative products to facilitate forgiveness and reconciliation.

The result is intellectually challenging yet resplendently minimal: paintings that documentVincench’s evolution, absorbing societal cynicism while offering spaces for reflection. As heirs to concrete abstraction, conceptualism, and language-based art, they transcend representation, inviting collectors to engage with works that are both critically subversive and visually arresting — conceptually rich, historically resonant investments that evolve beyond stereotypes.

José Vincench (b. 1973, Holguín, Cuba) lives and works in Havana, where he served as a professor at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) and is currently a professor at La Academia de San Alejandro. His works are held in prestigious collections including the UBS Art Collection (New York), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Havana), Pizzuti Collection, CIFO Collection (Miami), Frost Museum (Florida International University, Miami), Perez Collection (Miami), Shelley and Donald Rubin (New York), and Chris von Christierson (London).

Gallery hours: Wednesday to Friday 1:30 - 6 pm, Saturday 11 am - 4 pm. For inquiries, images, or interviews, contact info@532gallery.com.