Wallace dos Santos: Cherry Blossom Girl Opening Reception

place becomes imbricated with the people, memories, architectural details, and recurrent encounters that shape our lives. The exhibition takes its title from the second song on Air’s Talkie Walkie, an album that soundtracked a particularly tender period of yearning for the New York-born and raised artist. The paintings draw on the visual language of New York City architecture, including brick façades, brownstones, wrought-iron fences, and ornamental details that often become invisible through everyday familiarity. Flowers, fruits, and other forms of plant life introduce another visual vocabulary, evoking relationships of nurture, care, protection, and growth that shape childhood and community. The paintings’ ornamental borders and frames borrow from the near-ubiquitous brick and iron fence patterns seen while walking around the city. Dos Santos’s work is inspired by the Portuguese concept of saudade, a deep feeling of longing for someone or something absent. The artist works with memory materially, using everyday recycled paper waste (billing envelopes, grocery bags, mail, and personal writings), sometimes sourced directly from friends and loved ones. These remnants of daily life are broken down, pulped, dyed, and reconstituted into new images. This approach has lineage in Dos Santos’s Brazilian heritage and in artists such as Beatriz Milhazes, Ernesto Neto, and Vik Muniz, who transform everyday materials into culturally resonant forms. These references inform the artist's interest in the emotional potency of materials that are overlooked or discarded. Positioned between painting, sculpture, and papermaking, Cherry Blossom Girl reflects New York as a collective repository, offering a lyrical and, at times, fantastical way of looking at the architecture and everyday environments of the city—an alchemical record of growing up, belonging, and remembering. About the Artist Wallace dos Santos (b.2000) is a Brazilian-American artist born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. They work in painting, papermaking, and sculpture to explore architectural and psychedelic realms. They received their BFA from The Cooper Union, and currently work in Queens, NY. Wallace has been a resident at the Ox-Bow Longform Residency, haul gallery Raised in Brooklyn Residency, and the Vermont Studio Center. Wallace is a 2026 NYFA Queens Art Fund recipient.