UPCOMING EXHIBITION FEBRUARY 2026

Spandrel Spaces at La QuNa Art Gallery, Caguas, PR

I will be presenting 23 paintings from my ongoing series at QuNa Art Gallery in Caguas, Puerto Rico.
February 1st – 28th 2026

‘Spandrel Spaces: The Art of In-Between’

The term spandrel comes from architecture. It names the spaces that emerge unintentionally when structures are built to serve other purposes. They are not designed directly, yet they exist because of necessity and constraint. These residual spaces have long fascinated me, not only as a formal idea but also as a way of understanding how meaning, beauty, and possibility often arise in places we do not initially intend to notice.

This body of work explores those in-between conditions. Not as voids or leftovers, but as active zones of circulation, pressure, and exchange.

The paintings in Spandrel Spaces are not representations of objects or landscapes. Instead, they are responses to forces. They are shaped by compression and release, accumulation and erosion, turbulence, and pause. Layered surfaces build slowly, often through repeated acts of covering and re-emergence. Forms suggest movement rather than stability. Color behaves less like decoration and more like energy in motion.

I am interested in what happens when attention shifts away from the obvious center and toward the margins. The overlooked. The peripheral. The spaces that exist between intention and outcome.

In many ways, these paintings track systems rather than scenes. Ecological systems, psychological systems, and social systems. Places where multiple pressures converge and something unplanned takes shape. This approach reflects how I experience both nature and human structures. Forests, institutions, relationships, and inner states all generate spandrels. They produce spaces that were never designed but are nonetheless vital.

The exhibition at QuNa brings together works made over an extended period, allowing these ideas to be seen in dialogue with one another. Across the 23 paintings, there is variation in scale, density, and rhythm, yet they share a common inquiry. How do forms emerge under constraint? How does movement persist when boundaries are tight? How do unseen spaces hold meaning?

Rather than offering fixed narratives, the paintings invite sustained looking. They ask viewers to linger, to move through layers, and to notice subtle shifts. What appears chaotic at first often reveals internal logic over time. What seems dense can open. What seems unresolved may be exactly where vitality lives.

Showing this work in Caguas feels significant. Puerto Rico is a place where in-between conditions are not abstract. They are lived daily. Between growth and disturbance. Between history and reinvention. Between fragility and resilience. The paintings do not illustrate these realities, but they are informed by them.

QuNa Art Gallery provides an ideal setting for this conversation. It is a space that supports experimentation and attentive viewing, allowing work like this to breathe and unfold.

Spandrel Spaces: The Art of In-Between is not about filling gaps or resolving tensions. It is about recognizing that the spaces we overlook often carry the most information. The most movement. The most life.

I look forward to sharing this body of work in February 2026 and to the conversations it will generate.

La QuNa
38 Hermanos Álvarez, Caguas, 00726
Google Pin: https://maps.app.goo.gl/96F5BLgETsdBkU4n8

Background to this series: Behind the Brush: A Two-Month Conversation between 3t Vakil & Gessie Houghton on The Spandrel Spaces Series (art inspired by life in the rainforest). June 2025
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-WsjdMr2lgee5YImxDheBqxtRi1SEeUa/view?usp=sharing

See more: https://3tvakil.com/blog/