Otero Fuentes, Saint, 2025, steel, 9.5 x 6 in.
Otero Fuentes, Deep Altars
Curated by Alitza Cardona
April 16 – May 9, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 16, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Deep Altars, a solo exhibition by Otero Fuentes, curated by Alitza Cardona, opens at Equity Gallery on April 16, 2026, presenting an ongoing body of sculptural work that interrogates hope as a transactional currency of the attention economy and proposes ritual encounter as its counter.
The exhibition operates as a constellation of spatial prayers. Each work is a material offering articulated through the intention behind structure, curvature, and tension, becoming a site of orientation where visible structure gestures toward invisible forces: hope, gravity, alignment, intention, and presence. Drawing on the polysemy of depth, cosmic, spatial and metaphysical, and on altars as material and immaterial places of offering, wish, protection, and encounter with the unseen, Deep Altars inverts the position of the viewer, drawing them inside the offering itself. Here, the depths of meaning held in need and in the gesture of encounter with the other become the very site where the divine is encountered.
In an attention economy where hope is produced and exchanged through social mechanisms, scroll, share, signal, the work refuses that logic entirely. Hope here is not content but condition: something held in the body, in proximity, in the act of standing before a form that demands nothing in return. The exposition revives ritual not as nostalgia but as technology, a grounding practice that restores the viewer to the present tense of their own experience. Where the mobile phone offers the compulsion to signify, the sculptures offer something older and more necessary: the possibility of relating through a threshold rather than a screen.
Working primarily with steel and concrete, Otero Fuentes examines how arcs, angles, and spatial rhythm shape human experience and the forms that could orchestrate circumstance. Trained as an architect, he approaches sculpture as a relational field where each work functions as both object and threshold, inviting viewers to move, recalibrate, and reconsider their position and meaning in space.
About the Artist: Otero Fuentes is a New York based architect and sculptor whose practice bridges architecture and sculpture to investigate structure, perception, divinity, and socio-material experience.