Helm Contemporary is pleased to present To See Is To Conjure, the debut solo exhibition by New York-based Puerto Rican artist Rafael Vega. Making reference to Jim Al-Khalili’s interpretation of Niels Bohr’s understanding of the probabilistic nature of subatomic particles, To See Is To Conjure proposes a correspondence with one of the most fundamental operations in art: the act of making and seeing. In essence, it demands from the artist and the viewer an act of taking something from its ambiguous existence, imposing action, and creating meaning. Following a general principle of conditioned improvisation, the works in this exhibition employ several strategies: the crude, repetitive manual cutting of hardwood with a circular saw; the gestural and fast application of acrylic pigments; and the cutting, folding, and pasting in collage overlays. The stubborn presence of a faulty and accidental unanchored geometry, which transits heavily through each painting, oscillates between structural limits, dictating a potential pathway into the future or acting as conceptual scaffolding. These open-ended explorations of pictorial space are distilled into discrete spatial condensates that are neither fully sculptures nor paintings. Their blunt "made-ness" reminds us of a basic and nearly forgotten condition of the artist-viewer relationship: being present.