MEXICO CITY (appro).- Unlike conventional curatorships that focus on an author or a topic approached from different perspectives, the renowned and unpredictable curator Guillermo Santamarina presents an interesting reading of the contemporary scene in Mexico.
Without pretending to define a totality and aware of the plurality of “organisms” that constitute the general ecosystem of art, the artist, also an artist, structures his proposal from a reflective exercise based on the observation of aesthetic coincidences. An intelligent approach that allows you to relate creative differences that include languages, disciplines and personal poetics. And for the same reason, in his curatorial selection there are no visual similarities, there are aesthetic “confluences”.
Located in the upper part of the Casa Miguel Alemán, in the Los Pinos Cultural Complex in the Chapultepec Forest of Mexico City, the exhibition describes its concept in the title: “Glóbulo. Predigital post-human morphology”. Understood as a small part of the artistic system –a globule–, the exhibition is made up of authors who approach figuration, mainly corporal, through non-digital disciplines such as painting, drawing, sculpture, assembling, and textiles. However, it is not only the visual configuration that sustains the works but, as post-humanism suggests, the internal structure or thought that interprets positive and negative consequences caused by the interaction of personal, cultural and social experiences.
Made up of 17 authors born mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, the exhibition stands out, in the first instance, due to the forcefulness of the works. As the curator points out, a characteristic of the current scene is the solidity in the identity of personal languages. Constructed from specific reflections and explorations that affect the formal resolution, the works allow their authors to be easily located. Another general aspect of the selection is the diverse interpretation of the body, whether through figurative vocabularies, landscape fusions, material-symbolic elements, or even a corporeal disintegration that leads to abstraction (Rodrigo Ramírez Rodríguez).
With the exception of Triana Parera’s digital prints, which, even when they present superimpositions of the face, contradict the criteria of including only pre-digital disciplines, all the authors and works integrate a narrative that proves the curatorial thesis. Museographed from sets of the same author –corridor with paintings by Emerson Balderas, Sofia Echeverri and Lalo Lugo–, from irruptions between similar disciplines –paintings by Manuel Mathar and Byron Jiménez, a sculpture by Jessica Wozny in front of a pictorial sculpture by Luis Hampshire–, and alternating disciplines and signatures –inks by Óscar Rodrigo Ramírez with textiles by Aurora Pellizi–, the exhibition provokes a surprising journey that treacherously catches the eye, provoking a reflective curiosity. The gaps in Susana Marte’s assemblies, those that look like silhouettes from pornographic comic strips, what do they mean?
A concern that is repeated by several artists is the deactivation or update of the conventional meaning of the images. Aware of the power they have in the construction of identities, they alter and reinterpret references to comics, pre-Hispanic figures or religious iconography, generating proposals as powerful as Byron Jiménez’s absurdities with a strong chromatic impact, or as irreverent as Mathar’s. Totally different, Lalo Lugo stands out for the subtlety of a fine palette that, through the psychological perception of color, refers to the nostalgia of pop surrealism.
And finally, another success of the curatorship: the integration of artists who live in different cities of the Mexican Republic.
