Ode to the Barbershop: Style as Preservation in Erick Maldonado Delights Momentum at Kingston Gallery

Erick Maldonado is a Dominican American Connecticut-based artist whose work explores the richness of Black Dominican gay life and heritage. He is an alum of the Emerging Artist program at the Kingston Gallery, which is currently the site of his first solo exhibition, “Delights Momentum”—a tribute to the barbershop. The exhibition is an armory of abstracted faces that, despite the sitters’ awkward poses, are ready to confront the world with their reinvigorated hairstyles. The one true-to-life face in the show—the youth getting his hair surveyed in 3rd Space (2024), a charcoal-drawn nexus of the themes and ephemera Maldonado references—fittingly succumbs to a lapse of worry soon to be washed away by the surge of confidence a good haircut can bring.

When first entering the exhibition, Kingston Gallery member Mary Lang and I were drawn to Community #2 (2024), a mixed-media ode to the hairstyle menus ubiquitous in barbershops. The menu, typically a numbered grid of headshots a client can choose from, is recreated here as eight distorted faces occasionally marked with mirrored, nonsequential numbers. Lang and I fawned over the ease with which Maldonado seamlessly melds past and present. One angular model, sporting what looks like a flattop, reminded Lang of the cultural significance of a haircut, and how timeless a silhouette can be. Another, with a fresh fade and side part, sits closed-eyed either in rest or contemplation, as if he’s been like this forever. Because Maldonado veers toward anachronism, his subjects belong to no particular era, instead embracing the depth of tradition honored throughout the show.

Across from the cool, calm, and collected faces of Community #2, Community #1 (2024) is a more expansive and varied interpretation of its successor’s subject matter. Also a mixed-media work, #1 is a six-by-six grid of freshly trimmed faces angled every which way, capturing the self-consciousness of having to pose. Subject #28 has roving eyes that lock on to the camera, unsure of where else to look. Subject #81 eternalizes a moment of exasperation. And there’s the thousand-yard stare that arises from having sat as someone’s muse as seen in subject #11. These characters are poised between vanity and stoicism—two personalities Maldonado often takes pleasure in conflating: a smolder can double as a fashion statement; to ignore the viewer can signal both indifference and seduction. 

Maldonado’s kinetic style evokes a long exposure tracking every rupture in a sitter’s facade. Eyes are regularly replaced by spirals; faces are crisscrossed by brushstrokes. It seems that Maldonado seeks to not only visually depict a barbershop but to capture the time spent within it. He captures the passage of time itself, and the hours people spend in barbershops and salons doing anything but getting their hair cut. In our post-lockdown malaise, as we rediscover just how little time our work-centric culture leaves us and the diminishing spaces we have in which to waste that time, artists like Maldonado provide a balm for our disillusionment.

The final piece in the exhibition, aptly titled La Invitacion (2024), is a charcoal drawing of a barber’s command center, replete with spray bottle, hairstyle poster, and an empty barber’s chair with hair sprinkled about it. The rendering of a low footrest reminded me of how when I was a child my barber would adjust the chair to my height so I could climb on. There’s a similar sense of warmth in this exhibition, in its love for the various styles and personalities that Black and Brown people assume and its advocacy for self-pampering as a necessary praxis. The empty chair beckons: “Delights Momentum” is willing to meet you where you are.