Palimpsest

Nicholé Velásquez
Gitana Rosa Gallery

Palimpsest is a term borrowed from manuscript culture: a writing surface incompletely erased and reused, in which earlier layers of text remain visible beneath the new inscription. As a curatorial frame, it resists the logic of replacement and the assumption that the present supersedes what came before, insisting instead on coexistence: the persistence of earlier strata within any contemporary moment.

This is precisely what Velásquez's practice enacts at both a technical and conceptual level. Working with analogue multiple exposure, he composes directly within the camera: several distinct photographic moments — bodies, architectures, landscapes — are registered onto a single negative, without the possibility of post-production correction or digital mediation. The image is not assembled. It accumulates. Each exposure does not cancel the previous one but inhabits it.

Velásquez trained at the International Center of Photography and was later awarded the Prix Industries et Cultures / Art Faber for his sustained attention to contemporary industrial processes — the choreography of labour within systems structured by maximum efficiency and minimum slack. That the same artist would develop a technique premised on accumulation and suspension rather than selection is not a contradiction but a revealing tension: multiple exposure introduces delay, density, and friction into visual regimes that increasingly privilege speed and resolution.

The implications extend beyond formal considerations. In these photographs, no single subject holds visual authority: a corporate tower dissolves into something ancient and ruinous; a body becomes indistinguishable from the terrain it moves through; urban geometry and organic form press against one another without resolution. These are not metaphors applied to photographs. They are structural conditions of the photographs themselves.

Velásquez’s decision to work in analogue is therefore not nostalgic but epistemological. It concerns how an image can register the world. Rather than isolating a decisive instant, film allows multiple moments to coexist within the same frame. The resulting photographs resist the conclusiveness of the digital image and the authority of the single viewpoint.

Palimpsest asks us to consider how images — like memories, like cities, like political histories — are never singular or stable but composite: the result of successive inscriptions that partially obscure and partially reveal one another. For Velásquez, whose practice unfolds between New York and Berlin and whose curatorial work has engaged queer and feminist histories, the palimpsest is not simply a formal device. It is also a refusal of erasure — an insistence that what lies beneath the surface remains legible.

The photographs sustain this condition of visibility. What appears is never a single image but a layered field of relations: contemplative and documentary, aesthetic and political, individual and collective, all held together within the same frame.

Emilio Rapanà, March 2026


Gitana Rosa Gallery Presents Palimpsest

Launching GR Virtual Production Studios with a Solo Photographic Exhibition by Nicholé Velásquez (he/him)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — Jersey City, NJ (February 9, 2026)

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EXHIBITION DETAILS (QUICK FACTS)

Title: PALIMPSEST
Artist: Nicholé Velásquez (he/him)
Opening Reception: Friday, March 6, 2026 | 6:00–10:00 PM
On View: March 6 – May 1, 2026
Viewing: Opening night public; otherwise by appointment only
Venue: GR Virtual Production Studios, 15 Wilkinson Ave, Unit 4B–6, Jersey City, NJ

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OVERVIEW

Gitana Rosa Gallery presents PALIMPSEST, a solo photographic exhibition by Nicholé Velásquez (he/him), inaugurating the public launch of GR Virtual Production Studios in Jersey City. The exhibition opens Friday, March 6, 2026 (6:00–10:00 PM) and remains on view through May 1, 2026.

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CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Velásquez’s photography is not a single captured moment, but a PALIMPSEST: a surface overwritten by time, memory, and revolution. Each image is an act of excavation, revealing and concealing forms that emerge, collapse, and reappear. Architecture and landscape blur into one another. Color and light are not mere description, but sensation; a call to arms for the eye. The result is a body of work that is both intimate and expansive, demanding close looking and rewarding that watching with new meanings. In Velásquez’s hands, the photograph becomes an interstitial interface—like a mirror—forcing the viewer to confront the traces of what came before and the possibilities of what might yet be.

Launching GR Virtual Production Studios with a solo photography exhibition is deliberate: it establishes the space as both a production destination and a cultural venue, and introduces an ongoing program designed to connect Jersey City’s creative community with the New York art ecosystem and an evolving Berlin dialogue.

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JC FRIDAYS

This event is part of JC Fridays, a free city-wide visual & performing arts festival held four times a year at the start of every season. Events take place across Jersey City in restaurants, galleries, hair salons, and beyond. Please check out future offerings at www.jcfridays.com.

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ARTIST BIO (SELECTED)

Nicholé Velásquez is a New York–born artist and photographer whose practice spans experimental analogue photography, portraiture, and compositional theory, with a sustained transatlantic presence between the U.S. and Northern Europe. He has exhibited at the International Center of Photography (ICP) and participated in ICP’s Vantage Point exhibitions, and Gitana Rosa Gallery presented his work in the context of Art Basel Miami.

Velásquez’s career includes residencies and research appointments across Europe, including Christiania (Denmark) and an Artist-in-Residence with the City of Copenhagen, as well as two invited residencies at Jørn Utzon’s Can Lis in Mallorca through the Danish Art Foundation/Jørn Utzon Foundation.

He is a recipient of the ICP Fellowship / Jocelyne Benzakin Fellowship Scholarship (under the supervision of Joseph Rodriguez) and was awarded the Prix ART FABER (Paris). His work has been presented in Berlin, including the Arts and Culture festival for the Tom of Finland Foundation’s 40th anniversary at Halle am Berghain (2024), highlighting his refined technique of analogue multiple exposure—layering compositions within a single negative.

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SELECTED EXHIBITIONS / HIGHLIGHTS
• International Center of Photography (ICP) — “The City, Curated by Annie Leibovitz” (2005)
• ICP — Vantage Point 13/14/15 (2005–2007)
• Art Basel Miami — presented with Gitana Rosa Gallery (2009)
• “Botero, Warhol y Velásquez un joven” — Panama City (Yoo, Tamayo) (2019)

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PUBLIC VIEWING / APPOINTMENTS

The exhibition is open to the public during the opening reception (March 6, 6–10 PM). All subsequent visits are by appointment only.

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MEDIA CONTACT / BOOKINGS / PRESS

Vanessa Liberati — Gitana Rosa Gallery / GR Virtual Production Studios
Main line (inquiries, bookings, press): 323-559-2383
Alt: 646-783-8519
Email: [email protected]
Address: GR Virtual Production Studios,
15 Wilkinson Ave, Unit 4B–6, Jersey City, NJ
Instagram: @gitanarosa | @grvirtualstudios