At Newchild, the laws of matter lose their manners. In Fire Wets, Water Burns, Dalton Gata’s first solo exhibition in Belgium, fire does not simply consume and water does not merely soothe; each element trespasses into the territory of the other. Things behave badly, beautifully. The exhibition unfolds according to a sensuous, unstable logic in which contradiction becomes atmosphere and paradox becomes form. Gata, a Cuban-born artist living in Puerto Rico, has long cultivated a visual language in which the marvelous is not an escape from reality but one of its most exacting expressions.
Working across painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography, Gata builds images that move between stylized realism and surrealism, between seduction and unease. In Las Hermanas Candela, he presents three hyper-stylized female figures in a cinematic, suspended moment where glamour, tension, and ambiguity converge. Their exaggerated features and constructed appearances evoke a language of feminine power that is excessive, performative, and unstable, shifting between seduction and menace.
His figures are meticulously staged yet never fixed; they appear in the act of becoming, as if identity itself were a performative medium—composed, worn, exaggerated, and reclaimed. Gata’s paintings do not merely depict bodies; they choreograph presence. Artifice is not treated as falsity but as a strategy of survival, glamour, and self-invention.
This sensibility carries particular force here. As a queer artist, Gata approaches identity not as something stable or inherited, but as something made vivid through excess, theatricality, and refusal. Hyperbole becomes a liberatory device. Beauty becomes insurgent. His characters—sensual, strange, poised, and at times gloriously unruly—occupy a spectrum that resists conformity and the dull violence of normative classification. If the portrait has historically served as a technology of legibility, Gata reroutes it toward opacity, desire, and transformation.
In La Ruta De La Luna, Gata leans further into surrealism, constructing a mysterious, almost devotional image in which portrait and landscape merge. A luminous moon rests at the figure’s brow, casting a path of light across the sea that aligns with the lips, suggesting a spiritual journey—an interior route made visible. The title, “the moon’s path,” reads as both celestial and psychological, tracing a way through or toward the figure himself, anchored by the quiet specificity of the moustache. Luscious, flowing hair frames the composition like a living border, heightening the sense of enclosure and reverie. The features feel suspended and slightly dislocated, reinforcing a fantastical, assembled presence less concerned with likeness than with transformation and perception.
In Hombre Fuego, Gata brings forth a figure in a state of combustion, the face wholly composed of flame, where fire functions at once as substance, surface, and adornment. Across the exhibition, fire recurs as a central motif, but here it gathers a particular intensity—suggesting both a kind of costuming and a deeper, spiritual charge, as if the figure were lit from within. Its glow spills outward, softly illuminating the surrounding architecture, extending the body into space. Yet the figure remains composed, meeting the viewer with a calm, unwavering gaze, holding stillness within volatility. In relation to the exhibition’s logic—where fire wets and water burns—the work unfolds as a meditation on opposites held in tension: interior and exterior, spectacle and control, combustion and serenity, not resolved but sustained in a charged, unstable equilibrium.
In Fire Wets. Water Burns opposites do not cancel one another, but coexist in a charged and unstable intimacy. Gata’s universe is structured by such reversals: tenderness that wounds, beauty that unsettles, exuberance shadowed by precarity, fantasy sharpened by lived experience. Rather than resolving these oppositions, the artist lets them remain gloriously unresolved. What emerges is a body of work attuned to the elasticity of identity and to the surreal density of contemporary life—where the self is never singular, reality is never fully rational, and the impossible may be the most faithful way of telling the truth.
