Two friends of mine, paired together in Paris, both calling Los Angeles home, and yet an unlikely pair. Mark Whalen and Salomon Huerta both lost their homes in the Altadena fire of 2025, there lives shaped by a loss, and their art, though developed and concerned with space and human emotion before, felt a new sense of purpose in the months that followed. So Lumbre, the duo show with Ruttkowski;68 in Paris, captures the spirit of the artists’ work; how people use and see space and the domestic settings we build for ourselves.
Huerta’s empty landscapes, pools that appear untouched and unused, and Whalen’s otherworldly humanity in sculpture, both feel rooted in memory. What is life supposed to look like? What do we want it to look like?
In Issue 01, Huerta told me “I’m painting (the pools) as an observer. I don’t even swim! I also noticed that in all the pools that I cleaned, all the backyards I was in, there was no sign of life. There were no towels laying around, the pools seemed like they were never used; just getting dirty with leaves. And I would just clean them. To me the pools aren’t really peaceful. I would look at them and I would say, “Shit, I can die. I don’t know how to swim. If I fall, who’s going to save me?” My dad doesn’t know how to swim. What’s going to happen if I fall?”
I think this is a connection I see in Whalen’s work, this idea where there is a structure of life but something dangerous, funny, almost quizzical about them. Whalen is thinking about how structures are made and why we make them. He is looking at materials, substance of the sculpture, and questioning their intention and purpose.
For both artists, that is the key: in space, there is a wonder of why they exist, why do we make the things around us, and who are they for? It’s an unlikely pair, but they are having the same conversation. —Evan Pricco
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