One is Two and Two are Many More: group exhibit curated by Gean Moreno. Oolite Arts, Miami Beach, Florida

Carlos Betancourt

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1966. Lives and works in Miami, Florida.

Assemblages I, Faith, 1992

Mixed media, found objects, paint 50 x 36 in

La Silla Centrust, 1988

Aluminum

39 × 26 × 42 in.

Assemblages I, Faith brings together found objects, printed images, devotional items, and layers of paint arranged into a dense vertical composition.

Some materials show signs of wear or prior use, while others are decorative or symbolic. Rather than forming a linear story, the elements accumulate into a surface that feels collected over time-part altar, part archive, part personal inventory.

The title suggests a relationship to faith, but the work offers no fixed interpretation. Its impact comes from the tension between order and excess, personal memory and cultural reference. Assemblages I, Faith marks an early moment in Betancourt's practice, where material collecting, memory, and image-making merge into a single visual field.

La Silla Centrust presents the skeletal frame of a chair, its seat and back removed and the structure painted a uniform yellow. The curve of the backrest subtly mirrors the distinctive arc of the former Centrust Bank tower in Miami, designed by I. M.

Pei. Reduced to outline, the chair becomes a form suspended between furniture and sculpture-recognizable yet no longer functional.

Named after the bank once emblematic of Miami's 1980s financial boom and subsequent collapse, the work does not illustrate that history outright. Instead, it leaves a residue of it: an architectural curve, a supporting frame, a structure that remains after purpose has fallen away. The object reads less as something to sit on than as a drawing in space.