Designed digitally but built manually, artist Paul Sende’s sculptures and light installations unite the handmade and high-tech. Hung on opposing walls of Sende’s exhibition “A Garden in Space,” Link I, 2021, and Link II, 2021, both rely on a system of visual effects produced through the combination of tradition and innovation. To create these works, the artist insets LED lights into custom-built frames of white fiberboard, sealing them in with translucent Plexiglas in a variety of hues. The resulting visual effects create areas of color and shadow, projecting an image in the empty space of the structure.

On the central wall, the light installation HL, 2021, uses two-sided LED tubes set at 45-degree angles to produce a lenticular optical effect. These tubes are covered with two shades of vinyl that overlap to create a third color in addition to the baseline of white. The “image” of the work shifts as the spectator changes their perspective, resulting in a kind of hypnotic virtual vibration. Sende contrasts this visual fluidity with Sigpas, 2021, a pair of fixed two-meter fiberboard columns airbrushed with latex paint and epoxy resin.

As intricate as these works are, their basic elements can be traced to the two screenprints Bandera and Mon, both 2020, which together contain all of the forms, patterns, and palette of this exhibition. When condensed into a two-dimensional format, these characteristics make clear the similarities between Sende’s works and those of Miguel Angel Vidal and Eduardo MacEntyre, Argentinean artists of the 1960s who, practicing under the banner of Arte Generativo, pioneered the use of computers to design screen prints.

— Eugenia Garay Basualdo