El Náufrago / Castaway

It is a set of ideas that start from experiences (shared between artists) and thus form a concept of time, of testimony, of our lives or times, of our thoughts and reflections. Our present.

Painting gathers time, and in that time situations, connections between dialogue with others, and art is communication at a certain point.

Artists who use painting as one of the means to create are not isolated from conceptually problematizing the contemporary world.

A painting is not an island, it is the example of natural and casual friendship that has occurred in this group, and that keeps us in constant conversation through a WhatsApp chat, the painting brought us closer by coincidence although the ideas of art can Being different and presenting a single piece of each one is like constituting ourselves in a room, in the same way that we do it virtually representing each and every piece as a total idea of ​​who we are in a window to the viewer to know more widely what we create and how it shapes us.

Newspaper backs

To see the unselected of a note contrasts with time, is to question myself as an artist. This self-criticism of exposing the hidden to the history of events gives a counterweight to what was created and to omission.

It is discovering my creative processes, age interests and thinking about the diffusion of events that overwhelmed me or went unnoticed before my eyes.

One side and the other were information from the same day, perhaps with the same weight in grammage and ink.

  Monterrey.- Pictorial art can be the language of silence. The writing is also silent, unless it is read aloud. Painting and text speak in their own way, if we are willing to listen with our eyes. Cyberspace is also apparently mute, on the surface; in its depths there is music and noise. Speech coexists there in all its forms, from chatter to the most structured discourse. The growl and the rhetoric, the human expression. The image becomes a word; and this, in turn, becomes an image.

A painting is not an island is the title of the exhibition that brings together the work of seven artists: Salvador Díaz, David Garza, Leo Marz, David Meraz, Adrián Procel, Óscar Soto Lozano and Reynaldo Zesati. It arises in response to a disturbing event, when the seven friends realize that in the same room there are people who communicate by cell phone, exchanging text messages, from one end to the other, without looking at each other.

That is something that seems to be normalizing in our time: a kind of dehumanization, technological alienation. Perhaps it is the confessional or screen effect: sometimes people become uninhibited when they do not have the pressure to make facial reading of the interlocutor, even if other information is lost: close coexistence, the image of the living face. The only thing that will get us out of that self-absorption, which is not loneliness, is dialogue. Nobody is an island, even if it seems like it. Or maybe we are an archipelago, or a constellation. We are a human whole.

A man or a painting are never alone, they exist in relation to others. Somehow his existence always overflows. Everything is interrelated. It requires a listener or a reader, ears and eyes. Some are shy and introverted; others do not, but prefer indirect or deferred communication. The screen is hypnotic, it has us alienated. Friends set out to honor the simultaneity of existence. They decide to make their most recent work coexist in the same space. They look for the knowing look. The magnificent seven traded pistols for brushes.

Perhaps the most political painting is that of Salvador Díaz. Already the same title The Emperor's New Suit is a direct allusion to the story by Hans Christian Andersen, the one who speaks of the famous invisible suit, a recurring metaphor in Metaphysics, Theology and Politics. A modern fable about power and dissent.

Díaz builds in layers: the canvas, the newspaper, the ink and the paint. Like a palimpsest, the image and the word come together. The frozen time of the newspaper library becomes fluid again thanks to the artistic intervention. This work is the one that speaks to us the most, since it gives the impression that the human figure emerges from the newspaper, revealing the headlines that account for the news and events of the day. Intertextuality is its essence.

The famous phrase “The State is me” appears; but perhaps there is no longer a king or emperor, if not an Empire. The one that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri allude to; that more than sustaining itself on the people, it does so on globalized crowds. The ephemeral remains: the note about a young man who helps rescue his kidnapped father, the roads altered by the new Stadium; the red note and court decisions coexist alongside luxury fashion brands. The Emperor's New Suit offers literally many possible readings. Criticism, complacency or testimony of an apparently encapsulated time, but inserted in a constantly changing reality.

David Garza presents a very interesting vision in Broken landscape VIII. There, the natural and the artificial seem to merge in an abstraction that breaks the continuity of the landscape, or rather breaks out with geometric structures, breaks and fractures that end up joining the panorama dominated by a sun, thus giving a beautiful and disconcerting effect.

Leo Marz offers the diptych entitled Tongues of flame where the sketch of stylized silhouettes seems to represent a dialogue, the coming and going of words or the sending of a kiss.

David Meraz in BSSF No. 2 / Fantasy shows the coloring of the ornaments of the parties of yesteryear. A colloquium of birds, where a hummingbird seems to hold a ribbon or a streamer with its beak. Retro advertising or echo of the master illustrators of a bygone era.

Adrián Procel presents an enlarged image in Structure of the void VI: in what appears to be a photograph for an identity card, a head is missing. You only see the representation of a suit and an empty square instead of the head. Absence that by reflex could include us, as in those cardboard silhouettes with a hole in the area of ​​the face, so that one can stand behind and join the representation. Completing the game is equivalent to assuming the Men in Black look (black suit, black tie and sunglasses). Perhaps like Yves Saint-Laurent he aspires to create the female equivalent of the male suit. Anyone can dress like this, but socially not everyone will be seen the same.

Óscar Soto Lozano created an impressive work, called QUADRANTE, where the colors are aligned in an orderly and meticulous way, in such a way that they form a vibrant screen. This painting will awaken nostalgia and melancholy in older viewers, as they will remember that there was a time when television did not offer continuous programming, there was no permanent transmission of audiovisual content, then the dead spaces were covered by those famous colored bars . Something that the new generations will not believe. QUADRANT is hypnotic like an optical illusion.

Reynaldo Zesati gives us a huge postcard with his work Nature and Guyton. There the green square of some leaves is superimposed on two huge sheets of pink china paper, or paper cut by multiple Xs.

If you have the opportunity, go to see this exhibition and talk to these paintings. Judge for yourself whether it is worth talking or not. I believe that it is worth trying to talk by all possible means. More from the free play of art. It is an effort that we must make.

A painting is not an island remains on display at the Plaza Fátima Cultural Center from July 15 to August 21, 2021. Wednesday to Saturday, from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Free admission.