Membrane on Grid, Silvestre Preciado – 2025 – Extracted oil pigment on canvas, 31×43.5 in

Membrane Conduct

Exhibition Details:
March 5 – April 5
Spirit del Art Gallery
547 W 27th St #620, New York, NY

Spirit del Art Gallery presents Membrane Conduct, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Silvestre Preciado. This marks the artist’s third solo presentation with the gallery. Spirit del Art Gallery has been active for more than twenty years, with a history of exhibition spaces and programming in Miami, Puerto Rico, and New York’s Chelsea district. The gallery’s program emphasizes long-term collaboration with artists, with a particular focus on established and emerging Latin American art.

The body generates administration. And then there is the administration of the body.
— Ghislaine Leung, November Magazine, 2023

In 1975, when Christopher D’Archangelo tied himself to the entrance doors during the Whitney Biennial for his “Anarchy protests,” it raised questions about the body’s paradoxical freedom within administration. The administrative reaction to contain the body’s natural striving for freedom generates further administration of other bodies. While D’Archangelo’s protest addressed the system in which he was producing art, it also mirrors more literal forms of social containment, where architecture and policy are designed to hold, separate, and manage bodies.

Preciado is interested in the invisible expressions the body emits onto materials of detainment. Not what can be photographed or narrated, but what registers as residue, pressure, and trace. Whether sound, heat, or light glistening in the abyss, the body communicates with its environment through a reverberatory spectrum that surrounds administrative material. Things are recorded and yet repelled by the surface.

What emerges here is a structure under continuous pressure. Color plays a deliberate role in this tension. The bold palette mimics the synthesis of entertainment, alertness, hypervigilance, weariness, and sensorial stimulation. The work is often informed by animated sitcoms of the 1990s and cartoon renderings that skew everyday violence into satire. At the same time, the palette reflects the deliberate design of detainment materials, which is sleek in form, with controlled exposures of color that echo signaling, use, and direction. Applied by airbrush, extracted oil pigments settle onto rabbit-skin glue-prepared grounds. Mineral pigments replace synthetic color, and oil is stripped of its binding agents. Pigment is held at the edge of cohesion, and material is poised between stability and release, compressing depth and flattening space.

Several works draw from institutional design systems that appear symmetrical, multipurpose, and neutral, yet are engineered to separate and manage bodies. In Palindrome, a silkscreened image derived from the U.S. Department of Justice National Institute of Corrections Jail Design Guide is repeatedly printed across the canvas. As the image accumulates, the screen degrades, and the form begins to read forward and backward at once. Symmetry is insisted upon, even as it erodes under the pressure of repetition. Sound and vibration operate as conceptual undercurrents throughout the exhibition. Cymatics, the study of visible sound and vibration at resonant frequency, examines how sound waves produce organized geometry on surfaces. Sound behaves resonantly on tile due to the material’s density and hardness, reflecting acoustic waves rather than absorbing them, producing echo and reverberation.

Preciado approaches color as a parallel register, asking whether sound might be studied through pigment, as a force that exists within the darkness of administrative spaces. The heavily matte, pigmented surfaces in works such as Das Zwielicht (Twilight or Suspicion) flatten and merge volume and depth. The image resists spatial clarity and instead registers vibration, as if what is heard at night becomes visible as residue. Across the exhibition, what emerges is not only the administration of bodies and labor, but a quieter internalization of control, discipline rehearsed through repetition, symmetry, and the promise of order.


Membrane Conduct proposes painting as a site where organic and constructed systems quietly converge. Rather than resolving tension, the works hold it, allowing material, repetition, and surface to register how control is absorbed, embodied, and made perceptible.

About the Artist

Silvestre Preciado (b. 1989) is a painter and interdisciplinary artist whose practice examines the relationship between material processes, identity, and systems of control. Working with extracted oil pigments, airbrush, mineral grounds, and reductive methods that privilege vibration, trace, and residue over representational surface, her paintings register physical and perceptual tension rather than depiction.

Preciado’s work draws from institutional architectures, detainment materials, and sonic phenomena such as cymatics, using order, symmetry, and repetition to examine how structures of control are internalized and embodied. Her compositions often approach the logic of systems that appear stable while remaining materially and perceptually unstable.

She received a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MA in Philosophy and Art History from the University of Kent. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Berlin, Mexico City, Ecuador, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Miami, with additional presentations at group exhibitions and art fairs across Europe and the Americas. She lives and works between Germany and the United States.

Silvestre Preciado’s Work

The Body Generates Administration, Silvestre Preciado – 2020
Oil on canvas, 51X43 in

Observation Room Test, Silvestre Preciado – 2025
Extracted oil pigment and gouache on canvas, 24×20 in

Membrane on Grid, Silvestre Preciado – 2025
Extracted oil pigment on canvas, 31×43.5 in

For further inquiries:
spiritdelartgallery@gmail.com
@spiritdelartgallery