Retreat

Retreat is conceived as a pause, a threshold. In a moment when the world feels saturated by speed, conflict, opinion, and the constant pressure to react, this exhibition proposes something quieter and, in its own way, more radical: a space to step back from the noise and return to presence. Henrique Faria New York becomes, temporarily, a site of retreat not as escape, but as recalibration; not as withdrawal, but as a re-entry into perception. Emilia Azcarate's Gohonzon and Honzon series emerge from a lifelong urgency to remain in contact with the spiritual. Shaped by lived experience across distinct traditions, her current practice of Nichiren Buddhism brings devotion into the everyday through chanting and study; an insistence that illumination is not elsewhere, but inherent, available, and activated through repetition. The works are built as complex interpretations of the Gohonzon's symbology and iconography, structured through a re-imagining rather than a depiction. For Azcarate, these series are equivalent to the Treasure Tower of the Lotus Sutra: the allegorical tower that rises from the earth as a sign of the potential for Buddhahood in every being. In her hands, that tower becomes an abstract architecture - compositions of circles that associate, overlap, and accumulate like concentric breaths, like fields of resonance. The image does not illustrate faith; it performs it. It becomes a diagram of attention, an invitation to enter the work as one enters practice: slowly, repeatedly, without certainty but with trust. Luis Roldan answers with a floor of ceramic vessels painted with white circles filled with water - small lunar basins holding reflection. Inspired by the moon and by Federico Garcia Lorca's Romance de la luna, luna, the installation offers a different kind of devotion: one to material, to surface, to the fragile act of seeing. Water, here, is not a symbol but a condition - changing with light, trembling with movement, refusing to stay fixed. Each circle becomes a quiet instrument of perception, a minimal mirror that returns the viewer to their own pace. Together, Azcarate and Roldan build an environment where the gallery shifts from container to threshold. Retreat asks what it means to make room internally when the external world is loud and saturated. It suggests that attention can be a shelter, repetition can be a form of care, and that contemplation is not passive but deliberate: a way to hold complexity without being consumed by it. In this space, looking slows into listening. And the act of being here, now, becomes a kind of meditation.