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Fountainhead’s Open House Introduces Three January Artists in Residence

Marcelo Moscheta, Camilo Restrepo and Guillermo Garcia Cruz are three South Americans in Miami working on their craft at Fountainhead. Meet them at an open house on Thursday, Jan. 30. (Photo by Karli Evans, courtesy of Fountainhead Arts)
Fountainhead has selected three South Americans who each bring unique mediums, relationships with Miami, and goals for the January residency month in Fountainhead’s Morningside home.
When asked about the selection process for each class, associate director Nicole Martinez said, “The throughline generally is after meeting the artists via interview during the selection process, we think about their personality, their practice and where they’re from and consider who would pair well with them. Once we’re all together, we often discover there are even more synergies. For example, this month we’re finding that all three artists approach their practice with a grid-like methodology”.
Camilo Restrepo’s practice largely focuses on violence, particularly violence predicated in the wake of the war on drugs in Colombia. Violence is soaked into the practice itself, both in imagery and methodology. Restrepo (b. 1973, Medellín) draws a perverse mixture of bright colors, famous American cartoon characters, and acts of gory and disconcerting brutality. His work is then often ripped, crumpled, spat on, torn, power washed, glued, taped, redrawn, and reinforced in a vicious cycle of destruction and repair, resulting in a medium that feels leathered to the touch.

Camilo Restrepo is focusing on his newest body of work during his Fountainhead residency. (Photo by Karli Evans, courtesy of Fountainhead Arts)
These drawings are coupled with conceptual, visual representations of archival work he’s maintained for over a decade, tracking several of the buzzwords used in Colombian news around narcotics. Some examples include the nicknames for different narcos (Ñeñe, Paloleche, Memín, for example) and the “narco-ification” of contemporary Colombian vocabulary to describe the activities these traffickers are engaging in. The resulting work mixes newspaper cutouts, collages, and archival visualizations that read like big data graphics.
Restrepo’s newest work – he’ll put some of his focus on these during the residency – has more of an air of whimsy to it: a series of drawings representing hippos in several narco-related absurdist activities. In the ’80s, infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar purchased four hippos from a United States zoo for his estate in Colombia. These hippos have since proliferated the country as an invasive species; what’s more, because the hundreds of hippos that now live in Colombia come from such a limited gene pool, they are all severely inbred. Camilo uses this story, rife with the gluttony of ill-gotten excess and almost too ridiculous to believe, to explore the watershed effect of illicit drug trade economies.
Guillermo Garcia Cruz (b. 1988, Montevideo, Uruguay) applies methodologies rooted in Latin America (namely, concretism and Madí) to contemporary quandaries and aesthetics. One main focus of his is human’s relationship to smartphones, a ubiquitous staple in almost everyone in the first world’s lives. His approach to representing a smartphone is rather nuanced. Garcia Cruz will paint several vertically oriented rectangles, representing the intended orientation and dimensions of a smartphone screen, overlapping one another and in novel arrangements. The resulting amorphous shapes then inform the spacing and framing around them, and, in true Madí fashion, create these angular, bespoke reinterpretations of phone screens that toe the line between painting and sculpture.

Guillermo Garcia Cruz sin front of two of his enigmatic “glitch” pieces. (Photo by Karli Evans, courtesy of Fountainhead Arts)
Garcia Cruz extends this same visual motif of overlapping rectangles by creating 3-D printed cinder blocks that melt into one another, coming together to make an abstract column. He then works with a fabricator to make life-size, glossy metal versions of these sculptures which, when enough are melded into one another, can tower over a human being like a totem. For viewers who would like to see this work in person, he currently has a solo exhibition at Piero Atchugarry Gallery until the end of this month, which is fortuitously timed with the duration of his residency in Miami.
Marcelo Moscheta (b. 1976, São José do Rio Preto, Brazil) arrives to Miami after a busy 2024 with three site-activated solo exhibitions (in Lisbon, Granada, and Sao Paulo) and research for his PhD from the University of Coimbra (Portugal) underway. Through an approach that considers geology, land, and conceptualist movement, much of the initial process of Moscheta’s most recent work entails simply walking. On his walks, he may pick up stones, retrace his path, move through a location with symbolic meaning, and reappropriate archival footage from rock scientists and cartographers to create a body of work that is installation-based, but also belies a certain performative underbelly.

Marcelo Moscheta in front of To “Observe a Territory” (2025) and “To Follow Thorns (2025).” (Photo by Karli Evans, courtesy of Fountainhead Arts)
Moscheta brought two pieces he’s already made during his residency, from a series of works featured in his Sao Paulo exhibition, titled “To Observe a Territory” (2025) and “To Follow Thorns” (2025), respectively.
They are graphite drawings on black, textured, PVC plastic, giving the graphite a translucent, almost holographic look. The names are references to a part of “Walkscapes: Walking as Aesthetic Practice” by Francesco Careri, where the reader is tasked to match actions with objects under the framework of intentional walking. In talking with the artist, he expressed some relief at being able to freely explore what to make next without being tasked with specific output. Moscheta is using that opportunity to create new collage work out of archived photos of the Sahara Desert he took several years ago.
There is also a throughline — each participated in some way, shape, or form in last month’s Art Basel Miami Beach at the convention center. Cruz had one of his cinder block sculptures in the Meridians section of the fair, Moscheta’s collage work was shown with Gallery Nosco, and Restrepo’s project involved the sale of crypto-cocaine in the fair´s bathrooms.
Unlike Basel, the residency is an opportunity for the artists to truly connect with the local art community, and each artist expressed that Fountainhead was taking special care to show them “around town,” as they are known to do.
WHAT: Fountainhead Residency Open House: January
WHEN: 7 to 8:30 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 30
WHERE: Fountainhead Residency, 690 NE 56th St., Miami
COST: Free
INFORMATION: fountainheadarts.org
RELATED EVENT: Guillermo Garcia Cruz’s solo show, “Divergent Structure,” at Piero Atchugarry Gallery, 5520 NE 4th Ave., Miami, is on display through Wednesday, Feb. 5.
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