Curated by Mariano López Seoane with Olivia Casa, Ulises Beisso: (Hidden) in Plain Sight brings together archival materials and thirty-four paintings, sculptures, and works on paper produced between 1994 and 1996. Central to the body of work on view is Beisso’s 1995 trip to New York—a pivotal moment when encounters with artists including Félix González-Torres, whose work openly addressed the AIDS epidemic, transformed his visual language. While the exhibition moves from paintings filled with saturated greens, reds, and blues toward a quieter palette of greys, terracotta, and earth tones, what remains consistent is the work’s viscerality and psychological charge.

Throughout his work, Beisso frequently turns to doubles and mirrored images to articulate the queer experience and his grappling with embodiment and visibility in a heteronormative society. His paired pieces explore how we present ourselves on the outside versus who we are on the inside, as well as the politics of the gaze—who looks, who is looked at, and what remains unseen. 

Homosexual (n.d.) and Heterosexual (n.d.) are two wooden boxes that resemble devotional altars hanging side by side on the wall. The former contains an etched bronze heart with ornamental details within its dark interior, and below it, a glass eye with a hazy blue iris and delicate lashes, labeled La Mirada ("the gaze"). Beneath the box hangs a shimmering white stone whose weight pulls the work downward—what the artist called a "heavy glimmer." In contrast, the box titled Heterosexual has its bronze heart outside, while a single plastic light bulb occupies the interior. Everything, as the artist Ulises Beisso described it, remains "in plain sight."

Installed beside the paired boxes is a piece depicting two nearly identical anatomical hearts against a luminous green background. Again, one is labeled Heterosexual, the other Homosexual. Both bear the handwritten phrase solo partes humanas ("just human parts"), disassembling the categories these labels serve to define. Beneath different sexual and social identities are the same humanity, the same biological organs, and the same capacity to love and be loved.

Anatomical drawings of hearts and eyes recur throughout the exhibition alongside liver and pancreas motifs, such as in No. 37 (1996). These clinical illustrations were Beisso’s way of locating desire, illness, and repression within the body itself. Eyes, for instance, point to surveillance and witness, recalling Uruguay's military dictatorship between 1973 and 1985, when state control became part of everyday life and queer desire was systematically suppressed.

In the second half of the gallery, the focus shifts toward the solitary male body. One of the exhibition's most striking works is Untitled (1995), a pair of reclining male portraits based on an anonymous photograph originally published in the 38^th volume of Parkett, dedicated to Ross Bleckner and Marlene Dumas. The painting on the left depicts an ash-coloured figure in underwear lying on a bed against a dark background. Pastel brushstrokes soften the body into a vulnerable, luminous, almost ghostly form. Thorned roses pierce his throat and leg, and sharply pointed stars mark the place of his heart. Pain and beauty, openness and guardedness coexist within the same body. The figure turns into an object of desire while simultaneously asserting agency by returning the viewer's gaze. 

The painting on the right appears almost like its reflection, with the figure reclining in the opposite direction. The roses and stars remain, but they are smudged and appear faded, barely visible to the naked eye. While there were very few changes compositionally, this latter version feels more subdued and emotionally complex—its previously decorative edge becomes muted, and this insistence on the same figure starts to stand out. The repetition and even obsession with the same human form suggest a singular urgency to communicate and inhabit emotional nuance through embodied imagery.

Parsing through Beisso’s paired works and recurring motifs in the exhibition, it becomes increasingly impressive how his deeply introspective and dynamic world can be conveyed through permutations of simple forms. The dichotomous conditions that defined how queerness was perceived at the time of the works’ creation are simultaneously materialized and deemed inconclusive. In plain sight, everything from skin to heart is laid bare.

Ulises Beisso: (Hidden) in Plain Sight is on view at ISLAA through August 29, 2026.