SANDER VERSLUIS GALLERY

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Oscar Morel
Mi Paladín
05 September – 17 October 2026

Oscar Morel: Mi Paladín

Oscar Morel (b. 1997) builds his wall-mounted scenes the way his grandmother packed her suitcase: whatever she could carry, mixed together until it made its own kind of sense. Each winter she arrived in New York from the Dominican Republic (DR), carrying glucose and blood pressure meters, eggs to draw out bad spirits, and bundles of hay for a nativity scene. Morel's works consist of discarded clothes, donated blankets and oil paints scraped from befriended artists' palettes. Up close, they are mosaics of countless pieces of fabric, each a fragment of another story. They directly respond to where Morel has lived and worked: from colorful, shiny fabrics of Provincetown to earthy, sturdy textiles of his first Amsterdam autumn. Taking a step back, urban scenes become legible, often built from personal memories. Questions of arrival and departure recur throughout, the culture of his parents' homeland interwoven with lived experiences of growing up Dominican American in New York.

In La Guardia – a play on both the airport in Queens and Spanish for 'the guard' – a woman in a white shimmering gown is seated on a staircase constructed from found wood, behind her a plot of land made from denim, dyed canvas, curtains, magazines and an old carpet. Morel grew up watching his aunties and cousins visiting from the DR pose for photographs in their finest outfits outside his parents' New York apartment, proof for those back home that the American dream had paid off. For Morel, the Black body carries an inherently political weight. Posing for a picture or just sitting down and feeling at ease are, therefore, also political gestures. In mundane, intimate scenes like these, Black Joy becomes a form of resilience, embracing Black culture and communal ease rather than victimhood.

Homes within Homes II and III reflect on the sacrifices made after departing. Morel's father was trained as an architect in the Dominican Republic and his mother studied mathematics. In the US, they were required to take their licensing exams in English, and neither passed. His mom went into teaching, his dad into catering, but a drafting table with countless sketches was always standing in the house. In this series, Morel builds his own blueprints in return. New York fixtures like Madison Square Garden are warped into pianos and flowerbeds are shaped like subway cars. As with much of his work, these structures emerge through a process in which Morel does not always know exactly what a work will become until it takes shape. The resulting architectural fictions pay homage to his parents' practices and to the sacrifices that made room for his own.

The most openly devotional piece in the show, Whisper Our Small Voices, is the one that took him the longest to settle. He began it not long after his grandmother passed away, when he had just started his residency at De Ateliers and was working through what her faith had actually meant to him. Morel built it as a shrine, borrowing the tight, whispering closeness of the three figures from religious diptychs. But he refrains from the solemn aspect of religion. Instead, he looks for sensual intensity. Morel doesn't see much difference between reverence and a good party. Religious storytelling has always leaned on grand gestures, he points out, so a little sensuality was never far off. He draws inspiration from the late 1990s hood film Belly, where strip-club blacklights lend the characters an almost holy glow. The wood panels in the relief mirror the ones in the basement of his best friend's parents, who threw parties for which he'd install purple lights to recreate the steaminess of Sean Paul's music videos. By replacing these deep blues and violets with a clean, white light, Morel moves his ensemble to the end of the party when the bright lights have come back on, the moment before everyone goes their separate ways again.

Text by Elena van den Boogerd

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