Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present One Becomes The Other, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles artist Nery Gabriel Lemus, the artist’s seventh with the gallery. This exhibition continues Lemus’s exploration of the ways that identity, community, and belonging resonate through the spaces and symbols that make up a life. Lemus achieves near-photographic soft focus in watercolor compositions that merge a scientific gaze with an intuitive feel for the history and meanings of objects, images, and ideas.

One Becomes The Other is the latest entry in Lemus’s decade-long inquiry into the spaces and places that house meaning within immigrant communities. Where previously he has explored the landscapes, neighborhoods, and homes that populated his own childhood in Los Angeles’s Pico-Union neighborhood, with this show Lemus casts his gaze into the future, looking for answers to the question of how an identity is shaped and formed over time. This body of work synthesizes ideas that have been percolating through Lemus’s work for nearly a decade, and investigates how identity, place, and even language evolve into something wholly new yet unmistakably rooted in a particular history and experience.

Many of the works combine painted elements with found textiles, typically traditional colored and patterned Guatemalan fabrics, an homage to Lemus’s family roots in Central America. In the title piece for the show, the back—or “wrong”—side of a multicolored huipil creates an almost vegetal accumulation of loose strings, cut into a square that has been mounted amidst a lush bouquet in pinks, magentas, and mauves. The flowers press up against the painting’s surface, filling the picture plane almost completely. Florals can connote celebration or mourning, beauty or decay, and One Becomes The Other encompasses the wide range of this allusive power: as the artist describes it, “mourning the state of the world while still holding onto the beauty that exists within it.” In this context, the reversed huipil fabric encourages the viewer to find beauty in unexpected places, while also foregrounding the labor that goes into creating it.

Lemus also uses a reversed textile in Grandma’s Hands. Here, a bright red patterned Guatemalan fabric, turned wrong side up, forms the picture plane itself. The textile brings its own history to the picture, one that encompasses the hands that made it and the artist’s own connections to Guatemalan culture. The surface holds a pair of hands clasped in prayer, modeled after the artist’s mother. Lemus stitches his own prayer into the work through the repetitive, meditative act of embroidery. Titled after the Bill Withers song, Grandma’s Hands considers how identity, memory, and care are woven together across generations. The hands in the piece become more than a single person’s hands—they stand in for matriarchs, protectors, and caretakers whose presence echoes through time and sustains communities into the future. Elsewhere, the close-cropped agave leaves of Maguey Morado jostle for prominence in a composition whose bottom half is covered by patterned Guatemalan corte. This juxtaposition of two items that form a core part of Latin American visual identity renders this work a kind of portrait.

This exhibition deals directly with a sense of time, simultaneously unearthing the past and imagining a future in an effort to identify throughlines of mythmaking and identity. Four sculptural figures float outside of time together in What Persists, which pairs the works of contemporary artists with Mayan sculptures and fragments – proof that symbols and stories carry on even with the world changes around them. Elsewhere, Lemus looks to his own childhood, finding allegories for the alienation of growing up while navigating discrimination and cultural difference in a photograph of himself and his brother dressed for Halloween; or to the science-fictional future, imagining the far-flung adventures of the Star Trek crew as journeys of liberation in cinematically close-cropped, intimate portraits of hands at the motherboard, which itself has taken on the palette of Black power or the Guatemalan flag. Throughout the exhibition, Lemus plays with the viewer’s visual expectations, finding the throughline of humanity that runs beneath our visual culture, customs, and mythologies, recognizing and honoring the accumulation of these small moments that constitute a life.