KUMUKUMU is proud to present New York artist Fernando Mastrangelo’s first solo exhibition, “LoVE is a smoke made with the fume of sighs…” The title comes from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Pursuing his overarching mixed media investigation of society, history, politics, and literature through conceptual precepts, the artist here transforms the gallery into a three-room replica of a sea vessel, including a corroded anchor, a fragment of a battered raft, and a sculpture of the lower half of a woman’s severed body, made of cast sugar. The black heart carved into a sugar wall in the gallery’s back room shores up the show’s lovelorn underpinnings. Overall, the installation evokes a lost-at-sea, wreckage-of love ethos, simultaneously romantic and dangerous. Positing the three elements of art as death, life, and love, Mastrangelo plays the dual role of the broken-hearted and sensitive lover and the macho, tattoo-sporting seafarer. The show includes a series of love tattoo drawings set in circular frames of cast sugar. Together, they dot the side walls of the gallery like portholes. Here again, the inevitable evaporation of love’s sweetness is reiterated.

Conceived of as part of a continuum, “LoVE is a smoke…” draws on past projects in which the artist has used other symbolic materials often dealing with commodity culture. Staples like sugar, rice, coffee, and corn, as well as coal from regions of Kentucky, have been deployed in his work to specifically address energy issues as well as the wider abuses of political power. Through his metaphoric use of material, Mastrangelo is able to evoke myriad universal references as well as the particular relationships of objects and meaning across different strata of place and time.

Fernando Mastrangelo was born in 1978 and currently lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States, Europe and South America. Recent shows have included “Intransit” at Moti Hasson Gallery in New York and “Avarice” at Rhys/Mendes Gallery in Brazil. Upcoming shows include “Data Panic,” a group exhibition at Cuchifritos Art Space in New York and “Felix, ” in conjunction with the “Age of Anxiety” Volta show in March of 2009.