Marcos Rosales’ background is reflected in his deeply psychological work that is both cryptic and sardonic. Earlier works documented his search for his biological family with several pieces relating to an actual letter found in his adoption files. This emotional and apologetic letter from his biological mother was covered with black ink scribbles concealing all pertinent information. In Rosales’ world, colored by a rural upbringing of witchcraft, Santeria, tarot cards, and faith healers, the logic of autobiography leads not to the concrete but to twins, doppelgangers and multiple personalities.

In this body of work, Rosales mines his collection of stream-of-conscious writings titled The Demons of Diversity. Words and phrases lifted from his poems, stories, and monologues have been transformed into scripts for his numerous video works, as well as transformed into songs by the electronica band Experimental Make-Up. In this installation, the texts reemerge in his paintings as barely recognizable references, more abstract imagery than words. Their cryptic messages and surreal proclamations subliminally inhabit the stark white surfaces of the paintings.

The finished works serve as documents of translation upon translation, passed through numerous filters of Rosales’s own attempts to make sense of his experiences. In the exhibition space amorphous macrame sculptures loom and stretch among the paintings. They are both a three-dimensional incarnation of the language-based content of the paintings and a metaphoric connective tissue directly referencing the black ink scribbles which concealed information from Rosales’s biological history.