TERRITORIES

While the work references very real and ongoing conflicts, it intentionally resists pointing directly at any one place. Mastrangelo focused on the shared topography — mountainous, vast, and imposing — that unites these disparate regions. By working from landscapes of similar form, the artist creates what he describes as a visual equalizer: one terrain blurs into the next, and the viewer is left untethered from any one identifiable location, moving instead through a collective landscape shaped by dispute, memory, and projection. The land, absent of conflict, is often untouched, expansive, and quietly beautiful. The tension between indifference and imposition, serenity and conflict, offers a space for reflection on the permanence of the natural world and the instability of the lines we draw across it.

“The selection of these territories is not about documenting them in a literal or journalistic way,” Mastrangelo explains. “It’s about engaging with the idea of territory itself; how land becomes politicized, how borders are imagined and reimagined, and how identity is often imposed onto geography.”

Central to Territories is Mastrangelo’s material palette: sand, crushed glass, and rare earth oxides used as pigment. These are not simply formal choices — each material carries its own history of extraction, industry, and ownership. Rare earth oxides in particular sit at the center of contemporary geopolitical and environmental tension, essential to modern technology yet frequently sourced from disputed or ecologically fragile land. In Mastrangelo’s hands, these materials allow the work to double as subject and substance: the land is not only represented in the work, but physically present within it.

Territories builds on Mastrangelo’s singular casting technique of rendering natural materials as three-dimensional landscape paintings. Here, that foundation is pushed further conceptually and technically, supported by more than a decade of experimentation and refinement. Balancing control with unpredictability, his layering of materials and gradient control result in elaborate articulations, from sun touching the tips of a mountain, to the subtle shifts in a sky’s tonality. The palette in this series marks an evolution from the artist’s earlier output — more restrained and tonal, favoring subtle gradients over bold contrast, allowing complexity to reveal itself gradually. Each work is unique and handmade at Mastrangelo’s studio in Hudson, New York.

With Territories, Mastrangelo continues to blur the boundaries between art and design, pushing collectible work to engage meaningfully within cultural and historical contexts. “Design has the capacity to carry deeper narratives than it often does,” he notes. “There’s an opportunity for design to be more reflective of its moment, to hold complexity without sacrificing beauty or utility.” The exhibition asks viewers to sit first with beauty, and then with what lies beneath it — a quiet, layered awareness of an anxious and uncertain moment, rendered through material, form, and land.

Territories is on view at Cristina Grajales Gallery in New York City October 8, 2026 through February 12, 2027. Select works will also be on view with the gallery at Salon Art + Design and at Design Miami.