CLAUG CREATIVE STUDIO PRESENTS: URBAN CODE
A Collection of Encaustic Works by Salomon Khammi

 

Miami Shores, FL - CLAUG Creative Studio is proud to present Urban Code, a collection of thirteen encaustic and oil paintings on wood by Colombian-born, Miami Shores-based artist Salomon Khammi. Each work measures 12 × 12 inches and is now on view for the first time since the series was completed nearly a decade ago.

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The story behind Urban Code is as layered as the technique that produced it.

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Nine years ago, a Toronto gallery invited Khammi to create a body of work about the city, a place where he had settled but never quite felt at home. The cold was relentless. The distance from everything familiar weighed on him. And during that same period, a profound personal event made an already difficult chapter even harder to carry. Khammi made these thirteen panels in the middle of all of it, working slowly, deliberately, in a medium that demands both patience and presence.

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Encaustic is one of the oldest painting techniques known to humanity: molten beeswax mixed with pigment and oil paint, applied in layers and fused with heat. Each layer is built, melted, and sealed into the one before it. The process is irreversible and deeply physical, a fitting medium for work made in a period of endurance.

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Then, at the last minute, the gallery closed. Urban Code never opened. The pieces went into storage, unseen by the public, for nearly a decade.

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What makes the collection remarkable, beyond the circumstances of its making, is what it actually looks like. Despite the weight of what produced it, Urban Code is peaceful. Almost meditative. The works carry their history quietly, in muted tones and surfaces that seem to breathe.

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