Aaron Maier-Carretero: Up and Away | Project Room

David B Smith Gallery is pleased to present Up and Away!, Los Angeles–based artist Aaron Maier-Carretero’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Installed in the Project Room, the exhibition features new works arranged in unconventional configurations that blur the lines between painting, drawing, and object.

Working from freeform drawing, Maier-Carretero allows forms to emerge intuitively before bending and reworking them into recurring motifs—at times familiar, at times abstract. This process is aided by input from the artist’s alter ego, “Little Aaron,” a disruptive presence who introduces unexpected conditions. Through repetition, discipline, and release, the work moves between intention and surprise, arriving at images that resist fixed interpretation. 

In Up and Away!, this approach extends into the installation itself. Works on paper are pinned on the wall in structured arrangements, where individual drawings function both independently and as part of a larger whole. In this way, the exhibition shifts the focus away from the singular image, asking the viewer to read across relationships, rhythms, and spatial tensions. In doing so, the traditional picture plane gives way to a more open, object-based experience.

Here, intuition operates as an active force rather than a starting point. Forms repeat, shift, and reappear across the exhibition, guided as much by instinct as by formal decisions. Through this interplay, Maier-Carretero develops a visual language that is both deliberate and in motion.