Spinello Projects

✨ Congratulations to on their cover story with ✨

Photographed by Elliot and Erick Jiménez
Styled by Nycole Sariol
Hair by Dindi Hojah at Forward Artists
Makeup by Bo for Dior Beauty
Manicure by Stephanie Stone at Forward Artists
Set Design by Natalie Fält at Lalaland
Produced by Nathalie Akiya and Raz Segal at GTS Productions

☕️✨ Opening June 25th at the Perez Art Museum Miami: Held in Layers: Selections from Collection, featuring Clara Varas’ The Altar, organized by , PAMM Curator

Held in Layers brings together a selection of contemporary paintings from PAMM’s collection, all of which are being presented for the first time. The exhibition offers a focused look at how painting is being approached today across a range of practices, highlighting diverse techniques, materials, and methods to image-making. From abstraction to works that engage figuration and objecthood, each painting reflects a distinct approach—foregrounding decisions around surface, structure, and process. Seen together, these works invite close looking. They draw attention to how paintings are built, revised, and resolved, offering insight into the varied languages contemporary painters employ. By bringing these works into view, the exhibition creates space to encounter painting in its current moment through the diversity of practices represented in the museum’s collection. Presenting artists are Lucy Bull, Tomm El-Saieh, Justine Hill, Paulo Nimer Pjota, and Clara Varas.

🗓️ June 25, 2026 – February 7, 2027
Museum Hours:
Thursday | 11am-9pm
Friday-Monday | 11am-6pm
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📍Pérez Art Museum Miami
1103 Biscayne Blvd.
Miami, FL 33132

Image:
Clara Varas. The Altar, 2016. Oil, acrylic, spray paint on canvas, bedsheet, lamp, and coffee maker. 58 x 48 inches. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by PAMM’s Young Collectors Council and Aliette H. Carolan, Christina and Oscar Castellón, Carlyle and Jennifer Coffin, Rachel and Joseph Furst, Paula Kroll, Dino and Thelma LaCapra, and Diana Wyant. © Clara Varas. Image courtesy Spinello Projects

🗞️[amNY] NADA and the Necessary Electricity of Discovery
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“Esaí Alfredo’s The Necklace from 2026, presented by Spinello Projects out of Miami, moved in yet another direction, with photorealism carrying an almost devotional charge. The work’s majestic, ethereal color application gave realism a strange luminosity, reminding us that technical mastery need not be cold when animated by atmosphere and psychological depth. Photorealism, at its strongest, is not merely a demonstration of skill. It becomes a philosophical trapdoor. The viewer enters through recognition and then finds something more elusive waiting beneath the surface.
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In Alfredo’s hands, reality appears heightened, almost consecrated. The image does not simply reproduce the visible world. It intensifies it. There is a hush in that kind of looking, a sense that the ordinary has been slowed down enough to become ceremonial. The necklace becomes more than adornment. It becomes a point of focus, a charged emblem of intimacy, identity, and attention [...]”
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— written by Avalon Ashley Bellos
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Image I: The Necklace, 2026, Oil on canvas, 30 × 40 inches