Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce A Boy That Don’t Bleed, an exhibition by Caleb Hahne Quintana. This is Hahne Quintana’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. On view at 372 Broadway in Tribeca from September 5 through October 18, with an opening reception on Friday, September 5 from 6-8 pm.
|Building on earlier explorations of family, friendship, and the memory of home, A Boy That Don’t Bleed marks a turn inward in Hahne Quintana’s practice. This new body of work explores the mysteries of selfhood and the unconscious through the solitary figure of an adolescent boy depicted in repose and moments of contemplation. Where previous exhibitions bathed figures in the mythic light of radiant landscapes, these new paintings mark a tonal and formal shift, embracing a more ascetic, introspective, and somber mood.
This recurring, unnamed figure emerges from the canvases in ochre, cadmium, and umber, illuminated by light that is precise and atmospheric. A quiet tension unfolds between the drama of illumination and the stillness of introspection. Hahne Quintana constructs a world where light and shadow act as narrative forces—isolating a gesture, a shoulder, the sheen of sweat, the pages of a book. His process is deliberate and considered; each painting begins with graphite drawings, followed by gouache and wax pastel studies to refine color, scale, composition, and emotional tone.
Threaded through these quiet compositions are recurring motifs that lend the work a mythic undercurrent. Most prominent among them is the figure of a horse—a sentinel to the boy—an ancestral guide throughout his odyssey from inner awakening to self-realization. This human-equine relationship suggests a private mythology that Hahne Quintana constructs through repetition and atmosphere, something felt more than explicitly told. A chromatic thread of cobalt blue runs through the exhibition, marking the boy’s passage from scene to scene with emotional charge. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, these works evoke a world shaped by the quiet weight of being observed, remembered, or in the process of becoming.
The title, A Boy That Don’t Bleed deepens the exhibition’s emotional terrain. Borrowed from a line in a poem written by the artist, the phrase evokes the myth of masculine invulnerability, an enduring idea that boys and men ought to remain untouched by pain or emotion. It suggests a protected state of mythic immortality, like a saint, martyr, or a dream figure. Taken together the paintings in the exhibition form a portrait of a boy suspended in interior searching, caught someplace between the light of innocence and the shadow of transformation.
