Sweating Under Cold Water: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gordon Hall, Jinbin Chen
What does it mean to sweat under cold water? This quiet contradiction—of internal heat under an external coolness—becomes a generative metaphor for forms of intimacy, resistance, and queer embodiment that operate beneath the surface of legibility. The artists in this exhibition—Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jinbin Chen, Gordon Hall, and Gordon Matta-Clark—engage minimalist or fragmentary languages not to reduce, but to preserve: to make space for touch, memory, and the unseen to persist.
At the center is “Untitled” (Last Light) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. A string of 24 white bulbs, in brown sockets on brown electrical cord, the bulbs all on or all off. The work functions as both vigil and invitation of sorts. Each time the work is installed, the exhibitor’s choices of configuration complete the work – inciting questions around authorship, agency, change, and perpetuity. Gonzalez-Torres understood light not only as material but as metaphor: warmth, proximity, impermanence. Among myriad other possible meanings, the words in the parenthetical portion of the work’s title – Last Light – may signify the breath before death, or the moment just before the sun dips below the horizon. In either reading, it marks a threshold, yet one that is not irrevocable. When a bulb malfunctions or burns out, it is replaced. It’s cycle of renewal becomes a model of living memory: resisting finality, holding space for what remains.
Jinbin Chen’s paintings fragment and blur the human figure, rendering it soft, elusive, and emotionally charged. Evoking science fiction, dream logic, and queer desire, these works foreground ambiguity as a visual strategy. His handling of the body—isolated hands, torsos, or feet—shifts the erotic from the explicit to the spectral. Here, opacity is not a lack, but a form of resistance. As Amelia Jones reminds us, meaning is not fixed within the object but emerges between viewer and artwork, in a charged, intersubjective space. Chen's quiet intensity asks us to linger in that in-between.
Gordon Hall’s practice—sculpture, performance, writing—repositions the object as a site of potential intimacy. Drawing from their background in dance and a transgender politics of form, Hall’s works reimagine furniture as social prosthetics: familiar yet unfamiliar supports for interaction and memory. In Top Down Table (Ball and Claw), the inversion of a historical form disables function while activating presence. Their work, as Hall writes, teaches us to “see bodies differently”—not by illustrating them, but by shaping how they might move, sit, lean, or touch. Like Gonzalez-Torres’s installations, Hall’s sculptures are not autonomous but relational, requiring the viewer’s body to complete them.
Gordon Matta-Clark’s Walls photographs offer a different kind of fragment. His radical cuts through buildings expose structures usually hidden—plaster layers, crumbling bricks, voids. In the context of this exhibition, Matta-Clark’s acts of incision resonate with Hall’s sculptural shifts and Chen’s visual elisions. Together, they frame architecture not as enclosure, but as evidence of past use, habitation, and decay. These images of disintegration offer an oblique model for thinking through the ways bodies—especially queer and trans bodies—are made legible through what is ruptured, left behind, or made to disappear.
Sweating Under Cold Water is not about spectacle. It is an invitation to practice forms of slow looking, to attend to affect and absence, to recognize intimacy in abstraction. Across distinct approaches, these artists engage in what Jones terms “theatricality”—a mode of presentation that acknowledges the viewer’s presence, complicates authorship, and embraces contingency. These are not works that speak loudly, but ones that persist—like the warmth of skin in cold water, felt rather than seen.
The works do not announce themselves. Instead, they whisper, radiate, dissolve.
In the warmth under cold water, there is still life. Still light.
