Dalton Gata Garcia La Anfitriona, 2026 Acrylic on linen 177.7 x 225.4 cm
At Newchild Gallery, the laws of physical matter lose their manners. Running from 14 May to 18 June 2026, Fire Wets, Water Burns marks Cuban-born, Puerto Rico-based artist Dalton Gata’s first solo exhibition in Belgium.
Within this space, things behave both badly and beautifully, unfolding according to a sensuous, unstable logic where contradiction transforms into pure atmosphere and paradox solidifies into physical form.
Fire does not simply consume and water does not merely soothe; instead, each element trespasses boldly into the territory of the other.
Gata has long cultivated a multidisciplinary visual language—spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography—in which the marvelous functions not as an escape from reality, but as one of its most exacting, urgent expressions. Rather than resolving these oppositions,
Gata allows them to remain gloriously unresolved, offering a body of work attuned to the profound elasticity of modern identity and the surreal density of contemporary life.
Gata's universe is structured by intimate reversals where tenderness wounds, beauty unsettles, and exuberance is shadowed by precarity. In Las Hermanas Candela, the artist presents three hyper-stylized female figures caught in a cinematic, suspended moment where glamour, tension, and ambiguity converge.
Their exaggerated features and constructed appearances evoke a performative and unstable language of feminine power that shifts seamlessly between seduction and menace.
These figures are meticulously staged yet never static, appearing perpetually in the act of becoming, as if identity itself were a fluid, performative medium to be worn, exaggerated, and reclaimed. Influenced by his background in fashion design and popular culture,
Gata uses long, curved brushstrokes to choreograph presence rather than merely depict bodies, treating artifice as a vital strategy for survival and self-invention.
As a queer artist, Gata approaches identity as something made vivid through theatricality, excess, and refusal, rerouting the historical technology of the portrait away from easy legibility toward a liberated space of opacity and transformation.
The exhibition leans further into surrealism through works that merge portraiture with otherworldly landscapes.
Dalton Gata Garcia Criatura en calor, 2026 Acrylic on linen 127 × 177.5 cm
In La Ruta De La Luna, Gata constructs a mysterious, almost devotional image where a luminous moon rests at a figure's brow, casting a path of light across the sea that aligns with the lips to suggest an interior, spiritual journey made visible.
Framed by luscious, flowing hair that acts as a living border, the composition heightens a sense of enclosure and reverie, using dislocated features to favor perception over literal likeness.
This tension between volatility and stillness peaks in Hombre Fuego, a painting that features a figure in a state of combustion, its face entirely composed of flame.
Here, fire functions simultaneously as substance, surface, and adornment. While the internal glow spills outward to illuminate the surrounding architecture, the figure maintains a calm, unwavering gaze, sustaining a charged equilibrium between interior and exterior, spectacle and control.
Rooted in his Caribbean heritage and reflecting a rich blend of African and Spanish histories, Gata’s practice intersperses expansive, fantastical terrains with brutalist architectural elements and gleaming, gilded objects.
This interplay creates a visual landscape that is at once romantically nostalgic and deeply unsettling, drawing viewers into a world vibrant with confident self-expression yet marked by hidden insecurities and eccentricities.
Born in 1977 in Santiago de Cuba, Gata earned his BFA in Fashion Design from the Altos del Chavón School of Design in the Dominican Republic in 2005.
Dalton Gata Garcia Muchacho fumando, 2026 Acrylic on linen 41 × 51.4 cm
His celebrated work has been exhibited extensively across Europe, the United States, and South America, including solo and group presentations at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Peres Projects, and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Miami.
Currently living and working in Coamo, Puerto Rico, Gata’s works are preserved within prominent international public collections, including the ICA Miami and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, cementing his status as a vital voice in contemporary art.
Dalton Gata Garcia La ruta de la luna, 2026 Acrylic on linen 77 x 63.5cm
