Kara L. Rooney reviews the exhibition Alfredo Gisholt: Canto General at the CUE Art Foundation, New York, on view thorugh March 8, 2014.

Rooney writes: "In these canvases, scribbles, zips, and coarse gestural passages, often painted wet into wet, populate both large and small-scale compositions in a frenzy of energy and intent. Abstracted marks are offset by repeated figurative motifs—animal skulls, mechanical detritus, and rotting debris—vanitas symbols bloated and swollen by the loaded history that delimits their boundaries. Pablo Neruda’s like-titled book of poetry marks the departure point for this affecting solo exhibition, and indeed, the works read as poignantly as Neruda’s 1950 revisionist history of Latin America. The difference is that Gisholt’s narrative mines the contemporary American predicament as its source material, with the works’ feverish landscapes transposing man’s tenuous dominion over the natural world."