SAlÓn is an exhibition space with a by invitation program for artists, curators, galleries and institutions, to present projects and exhibitions within the complex of Salón Gallos.
SALÓN x joségarcía, mx
hotel trinidad
Gustavo Monroy, Yolanda Mora, José García Torres, Manolo Rivero, Germán Venegas, José García Ocejo, Leandro Soto, Diego Gutierrez / Kees Hin
September 17 - November 14, 2020
"My obsession with art is not about my own art, but the one of others."
M. Rivero
It was the summer of 2006 the first time I visited Merida, I arrived directly to check-in at the Trinidad Hotel after having traveled more than 1,500 kilometers by road. The hotel was on Calle 60 and 51 in the center of the city. A place full of works of art, antiques and curiosities located throughout the site with a chaotic and whimsical order; what had been the showroom of an automotive agency was used as a hotel lobby which connected with an art gallery and an antique shop. There were plants, fountains, sculptures and glass spheres creating an eclectic and surreal tropical atmosphere.
Meanwhile Manolo, the owner of the hotel, was preparing for his next and what would be the last trip of his life. A few days later he would travel to Asia where he would take the opportunity to buy more rugs, handicrafts and curiosities for his hotel and gallery which he handled simultaneously blurring the boundaries between one and the other.
Manolo Rivero, gallerist, collector and art lover, was born in Merida, Yucatan in 1941 and died while flying over the Atlantic Ocean in 2006. Among his many projects, perhaps the most relevant and to which he devoted the most energy and affection to, was Hotel Trinidad named after his mother, and which more than a hotel served as a true cultural and social center with great influence in the eighties and nineties. Manolo with a peculiar and eccentric lifestyle for his time, being admired and recognized for his great contribution to the art of the region and also for supporting Cuban artists of the 1990s during the Castro regime was himself an artist that generated special environments and connections through the art of others.
More than ten years after that first visit, I decided to return to Merida, this time to live here with my family. Then, I began to try to understand and reconstruct Manolo's influence on the cultural life of the city. Here, in the old factory of Don José Rivero -Manolo's father-, which we have transformed to conceive a set of cultural initiatives within the former Avena Rivero’s industrial warehouse, is where this review of his legacy takes place.
For the inaugural exhibition of SALÓN, the program of exhibitions at Salón Gallos, we brought together a series of works of art and objects related to the hotel and its founder, trying to remember the essence of that mythical place.
I hope you enjoy this exhibition along with the current and future programming of Salón Gallos, which I like to imagine, Manolo would have enjoyed visiting.
José García Torres
Mérida, Yucatán, September 2020
EL REY
Julian Schnabel, Daniel Daza
September 17 - November 14, 2020
For the moment, my name is Reinaldo Arenas. The Justice Department has declared me stateless, so legally I don’t exist. I live on the edge of society, in any place in the world.
I’m homosexual, anti-Castro, and I’m not religious.
R. Arenas
Reinaldo Arenas was born in Aguas Claras, Cuba in 1943, he was a novelist, playwright, and poet known for his magic-realism works and his opposition to the dictatorship of Fidel Castro. With the exception of his first book, Celestino Before Alba (1967), all his novels and essays were published outside of Cuba during a period of exile of more than 10 years after being persecuted by Fidel Castro’s government due to his sexual preferences. He finished writing his autobiography, Antes Que Anochezca a few days before committing suicide in New York City in the winter of 1990.
Arena’s autobiography was the starting point for the script of Before Night Falls (2000) a film by American artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, which portrays Arena’s life from his childhood in Cuba, the discovery of his homosexuality, his development as writer, the oppression he suffered under Castro’s government, until the exile in the United States and, finally, his own battle against HIV / AIDS.
Due to the restrictions of the Cuban government, most of the production of the film took place in Mexico, using Merida, Progreso and El Puerto de Veracruz, as locations, which simulated different scenarios in Cuba. During the filming of Before Night Falls in Yucatan, Schnabel, together with his family and friends, as well as actors from the film, including Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp, stayed at a mansion owned by the family of the Yucatecan gallerist and collector Manolo Rivero in Itzimna. During his time there, Schnabel made a series of works which were exhibited in an improvised exhibition in the dining room of the house at the end of his stay.
For El Rey, one of the three inaugural exhibitions of SALÓN: the exhibitions program at Salón Gallos, we have attempted to reconstruct that intimate exhibition in 2000 and additionally, include a series of photographs by Mexican photographer Daniel Daza, who worked together with Schnabel documenting the process of the film. Facsimiles of a selection of short stories in the Arena’s autobiography are distributed throughout the space, thus generating a container of different narrative layers of the same story from different moments and points of view, which intertwine and coincide in Reinaldo Arenas.
LEGADO NATURAL
Vanessa rivero
September 17 - November 14, 2020
In Legado Natural (Natural Legacy), artist Vanessa Rivero extends and refines some of the fundamental principles of her creative process: the (necessarily artificial) distance between the social construction of nature and its only apparent cultural counterpart; the relationships between human gesture, the zoomorphic archetype and matter; the examination of the conditions inherent to the Western evolutionary and biological discourse, and the implications of these paradoxes with regards to the current environmental crisis may well be the conceptual and methodical coordinates of the artist.
We can appreciate this in the work's installation. You will see drawings characterized as wooden sculptures, whose presence has been calibrated toward an indicial and primal meaning; being forms that sometimes crepitate as Mesoamerican, sometimes as First Nation, and sometimes as personalities made out of tzalam and cedar wood that simply compel you to reckon them as existent. Without cognition, but with personhood. Such are the functions of these archetypes also in their mural propagation. You will see the space woven by monochrome genetic units in which Rivero modulates the surrounding space from gestural geometries; always muscular, always fragile.
Vanessa Rivero deploys an allegorical field described by archetypes in which the graphic, (like the genetic) has the ability to bend and connect forms with temporalities. It is no coincidence that Rivero's installation connects with the memory of ancestors and legacies; his grandfather José, his uncle Manolo. Identities that today recur and revive in the pleat that the artist submits to the exhibition hall, its history and accidents; to other people's pieces and her own, to a memory that sleeps within the matter and acquires personality in the space.
Once incorporated, the drawing takes on the room creating stories, rescuing the history; both emerging from the love for the family’s memory. Love as a mysterious technology of spatio-temporal connections, one that can be fully explained neither from evolution nor from cognition. An atavism or a crease in the meaning, a first symptom of something that leaves us speechless. This is how the artist approaches her memories and materials; with total uncertainty about their future, with absolute awareness of an abyss that may or may not be real. You have to try to know.
Javier Fresneda
Mérida, Yucatán September 2020
Los edificios crecen como ruina antes de levantarse
Claudia Fernandez
28 november - January 10, 2021
In the jungle there are many mouths to feed, therefore food is fought over. We must do the impossible to go unnoticed by the predators of the predators and our predators. To achieve this, sometimes we are butterflies; others were less creative and evolved to have the same colors as toxic insects; thus, they did not have to develop the poison, but they are disguised to deceive the enemy.
Rainforests are the heart of the world's biodiversity and although they barely occupy only 2% of the Earth in the middle of the
narrow tropical strip, they are the home of more than half of the alive beings of the planet. It is a unique system that houses millions of micro-ecosystems. It is estimated that a single hectare of tropical rain forest can contain 42,000 species of insects, 807 of trees and 1,500 of plants ...
For nature it has been a gesture to accommodate so many plants and animals in so little space, and it has succeeded, creating a constantly sculptural three-dimensional world. movement. As in any multifamily, there are "those below, those in the middle and those above." In this way, many species can live in the same tree, have related lives that depend or not, on their interactions with other beings, and yet never see each other; as could happen in a modern building. In a world of intricate relationships, you compete to the death for an invaluable commodity: light. That is why the one who wins the race is the one who reaches the roof first to sunbathe. In these forests the canopy can be fifty meters high, which implies a long journey for a little tree that barely germinates.
Getting closer, moving away, are an integral part of the small moments in life, from macro to micro, like the subtle change of shade from one flower to another; and how the small inhabitants of these stems change their place or look for better and cooler areas to continue their work. Claudia Fernández (Mexico, 1965) leans back to perceive the isolated shadow, to try to portray when approaching in this pictorial installation, a world that is struggling to survive. Like an acetate that we forget in the dust and when the time comes, we return to it when time has passed and it is too late to recover the washed-out sound of the oil grooves that each copy has.
So the rivers, so the palm trees, so the red-kneed tarantulas, snakes, frogs, that every day disappear without leaving any trace to the human eye. But there they were, vanishing in the afternoon steam that emanates from the river and melts with the roof of the trees in a rain that lasts two to three weeks. It is a greenish ghost that shows itself daily, that it is there, that it lives.
Maybe ghosts are inherent in our eyes… we just don't want to see them. They are not the painful memory of an existence that left, it is a being that slowly goes away in silence oblivious to our concrete ceilings and invented needs for oil, plastic and paraffin. Perhaps you see these fabrics make us remember like a photo taken from the trunk, that there are all those Worlds that we decided to ignore and that have no entrance or proximity in our speed and uneasiness.
Gabriel Escalante
Mérida, November 2020.
Fui piedra y perdí mi centro
Manuel Mathar
06 February - March 20 , 2021
I was stone and lost my center
and they threw me into the sea
and after a long time
my center I came to find.
Anonymous
The ideas and the first stimuli that lead to the reasoning of an environment are generated in the frontal lobe of the brain and then travel through millions of bits of information towards the occipital lobe (behind the brain), where they are interpreted to form a conscious impression or unaware that each brain is its own version of reality.
Manuel Mathar (Mérida, 1973) generates, from his paintings, improbable analogies and connections that challenge us as a spectator to conceive different individual realities. With a primarily post-Dada style in current times, his works show situations that allow millions of interpretation possibilities.
For this exhibition, Mathar presents a series of works made in Mérida - his hometown - which he begins to discover after 40 years of absence. Through a kind of visual exercises, the artist tries to understand his environment and his own reality while perceiving it in a peculiar way, posing a series of subtly strange situations.
Women, domestic objects and animals are some of the reasons for study; comparing and relating to each other through a distant and helpless eye,
which in a certain way manages to rediscover its center by inventing its own reality.
José García Torres
Mérida, February 2021.
SIESTA
Randy shull
March 27 - 08 August , 2021
We have all been forced to pause in different ways throughout this pandemic that has taken over the world. At SIESTA, an exhibition of paintings created while I was in quarantine and working alone in Mexico, I continue my investigation of vernacular materials using Yucatan hammocks as the central material.
The hammock, an ancient woven and functional form, introduced in Mexico in the 15th century, is the nucleus of life in Yucatán, where almost all the inhabitants of the towns that surround Mérida, sleep with their families in hammocks to this day. . Hammocks are woven in these small towns by hand on foot looms by both men and women.
The colorful woven hammocks come from the local markets of Merida. The woven forms are intuitively composed on the ceiling of my studio, where they are obsessively painted and allowed to cure for days under the warm tropical sun. As an artist who sometimes makes furniture, I see the hammock as an antique piece of furniture that has stood the test of time, uses very few resources and is very pleasant to the body, giving it a feeling of weightlessness. Somehow I continue my furniture research through the use of the hammock, it just takes the form of a painting.
In making these paintings, there are an enormous amount of discoveries and possibilities that occur as they evolve from hammocks to objects that navigate the space between art and life. I love the absurdity of painting on a hammock, a loosely woven form with enormous force and tremendous absorption. The uncontrolled gesture and pattern comes from working with the hammock and requires gallons of paint to finish. I work outside among the barking dogs, flying green parrots, the sounds of Mexican street life, and a beautiful light. Without changes in shape, hammocks, for many descendants of Mayans, are the only piece of furniture in the home and are used by the whole family to sleep and take a break in the day, a nap.
Marco Díaz-Güemez
Mérida, March 2021.
POLIMORFOS
Ernesto García Sanchez
July 29 - 04 September , 2021
From observation to practice, Ernesto Garcia Sánchez is creatively obsessed with summarizing, condensing, achieving synthesis. His strategy, broadly speaking, implies a reduction of imperfect geometries, generated with the hands, trying to build -with shapes and textures- abstract and minimalist objects that combine the different media to which he resorts in his artistic process, until achieving the ideal result. which is achieved by reaching what is possibly the simplest configuration.
Born in Havana in 1989, he studied there at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts and, later, at the Higher Institute of Arts (ISA). Throughout his career, Ernesto has explored the idea and the fractal object through perfect forms that break and multiply creating a new order of patterns that become sacred.
For Polimorfos, his first exhibition in Mérida, García Sánchez presents a series of works that, although they are made with the help of industrial tools, the artist's hand can be evidenced in the subtle imperfection when trying to generate geometry from a more human perspective.
José García Torres
Mérida, July 2021.
sign of the mountain gods
Rafiki Sánchez in collaboration with Tania Solomonoff
09 September - October 23 , 2021
Immaterial.
Immaculate.
Supreme entity.
It is pure air.
Being supernatural.
Mayan deity of hunting.
Protective. Guardian of the herds.
Water supplier during drought.
Rey, with a small body almost like a dog.
Inhabitant of mountains, caves and springs.
It is a wayjel íik´, spirit of the winds.
A soul or pixaan that cannot be seen, but if for some
motive appears to a hunter it is some sign.
He emits a loud hiss, groans and bellows to warn his brothers.
He is beautiful, surrounded by a halo of light, has jade eyes and velvety skin.
It differs by having a swarm of wasps between the horns. If it is shot with a shotgun
the wasps will follow and sting the hunter. It is said that no j'men will be able to cure it.
Usually their presence is an indicator that the rules are being violated
that rule the wizarding world, they are propagating in the hunt.
Lord of the animals. If it is not appeased with certain rituals and
specific offerings, he will not allow any of his
animals appear in front of the hunter.
Sometimes he can fool you by doing
that you shoot on iguanos at their own appearance.
No one would dare to touch it, and if a hunter
had the audacity to kill him, he too
he would die instantly. The experienced ones
they avoid ending him at all costs
because they could carry their
community some tragedy.
It exercises control over the
devastation of the
animal wealth
of the forests,
jungles and
know how
t´sip kéeh
FEEL THE LOVE
Eduardo Sarabia
November 06 — December 12, 2021
Focused on his pictorial research, Eduardo Sarabia continues his reflection on the trip, but on this occasion the transit is linked to a kind of introspection, which responds to the search for the familiar, the warmth of the everyday, the importance of the landscape and the re -connection with nature, as a form of resistance against confinement.
A series of paintings that begins with the digitization of personal photographs of friends, family, meetings, and vacations are taken to large formats as a way of emphasizing the moment, the story, and the gesture. In these works we distinguish beach scenes with clear skies, palm trees, cacti and other plants, moments that are or have been part of the artist's life are interrupted by colored spots, which in turn call for memory and imagination.
On the other hand, in his sculptural works Sarabia proposes the narration of stories and experiences that have been present before in his work but now in an autobiographical way. ceramic drums of the same height as the artist's, based on the narrative tradition - cumulative and self-referential experiences but without leaving aside his characteristic critical approach to the political, economic and cultural situation.
PAIN AND PLEASURE
mildred enid
December 18 — January 29, 2022
The sublime of touch, beauty and pain.
In reality, it only requires that we pay attention to the sublime in nature.
The proportion is not the cause of beauty, it is not the measure but the manner, which creates all the beauty that belongs to the form and causes a degree of love.
Perfection is not the cause of beauty either, it goes beyond sensible objects. That is where it is highest, in the female sex, it almost always carries with it an idea of weakness, fragility and imperfection. Pain and love. considering those sensitive qualities In objects that we find beautiful through experience, or that excite in us passion, love, melancholy and pain.
"while captured by love we go round after round"
TRIUMVIRATE #2
Valentina Cadena
Ministry of Tourism Lying
Renata Peterson
Raul Aguilar
Paul Tut
Nibia Pastrana Santiago
Luciana Castañeira
Leonardo Ascencio
Javier Fresneda
Cesar Rendon
February 19 — April 02, 2022
What is Triunvirato? Under this apparently threatening and archaic name, three contemporary art projects are grouped that since April 2021 have been exchanging physical exhibition spaces, works of art, memes and ideas in chats and feeds. Albania Galería (San Juan, Puerto Rico), Luis Galería, Rayón 376 (Guadalajara, Jalisco) and Salón Gallos (Mérida, Yucatán) thus configure a temporary cartography that exists thanks to the generosity and curiosity of gallery owners and artists who have allowed an unlikely connection between the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean and the Atemajac Valley.
Thanks to this initiative, Salón Gallos presents a selection of works by the artists invited by Triunvirato and which are being exhibited sequentially in Guadalajara and San Juan. In a global moment of uncertainties, historical beginnings and endings, the fading of the public space and the militarization of the private, the elongation of identities and their possibilities, and the new medievalization of societies, these artists share clues, winks and also cheeks throughout of this strange itinerary that we travel.
In this show, you will see a selection of Leonardo Ascencio's paintings on polycarbonate, where the combination of corporate logos and his rock lettering tells us about a future archeology of the pop logo that describes the religious experience and the magical sign. Pablo Tut entangles us in his sharp analysis of moralizing depictions of drug abuse through a piñata-sculpture that is both irreverently grotesque and hauntingly familiar. Renata Petersen's ceramics problematize patriarchal representations of the individual and the state, transferring these stories to supports traditionally associated with the dynastic, the popular or the national. The Yucatecan César Rendón explores in his installed photographs the different modes of circulation of the digital image, on and off the screen, and its links with the theme of the everyday landscape. In a similar key, Luciana Castaneira recovers small fragments of glass and earthenware from the street that are transferred to paper using the intaglio technique, turning her urban drifts into fossil records of time. The Puerto Rican nibia pastrana santiago extends these concerns related to the landscape through the installation, choreographic activation and recording of her textual flags that speak to us of tropical pessimism, privatization of the coasts, activism and archipelagic relations. Raúl Aguilar clears Goya's The Disasters of War of cobwebs to propose a necessary baroque rereading where the modern massacre continues, but perpetrated by cowboys, bandits and outlaws. Javier Fresneda restores, from the deformity, the court portraits of the Spanish Habsburgs in an attempt to apply caricatural gestures from the colonial inventory back to their promoters. Valentina Cadena from Cali formats screenshots taken from sex-service chats as hand-embroidered rugs that sublimate physical and emotional work online in a task traditionally associated with the exclusion of women. Finally, the brand new Secretary of Tourism Lying down administered by Emilio Morales, Syndell Razo, Ascencio, Tut y Rendón will offer us a hilarious repertoire of toys and chatter produced from Mexican political anecdotes, where once again the trinket promises to become pure gold.
With all this and more to see, this exhibition by Triunvirato sponsored by Salón Gallos aims to open a gap of complicit gestures produced by artists from different parts of Latin America and the Internet, promoting the appearance of new ways of doing and relating from meeting spaces. physical and digital that we are left with.
AMAZON
bear sanchez
April 30 — June 16, 2022
REASSEMBLING THE LANDSCAPE
We live among groups
that seemed firmly established
¿But how could it be that
they transform so quickly?
BRUNO LATOUR
The word “community” has been circulating heavily these days. This phenomenon corresponds as an answer of resistance against the cultural homogenization of the world. In that sense, the photographic image revitalizes the status of amaze for the presence of something that is at the same time tangible and invisible: that what is social is a movement of reassociation and reassembling.
In Oso Sanchez’s Amazonas, we see just that reconfiguration of what is social in times of hyper connection: Women of Yaxunah that bets on a model of association that leaps from tradition to adaptation, and from novelty to integration. Sports, in this case softball, has allowed them reassociate and at the same time reassemble. Undoubtfully, their satisfaction is palpable.
So, what us a community if not a form of collective when the association builds itself in time between persons trough things, like the glove, the bat, the ball, the traditional dress. Is here where they recognize themselves as part of the group, when they can deploy the bonds they are involved with and reflect the photographic portrait of belonging and commitment.
Paraphrasing philosopher Bruno Latour, the photographer will take issue on reassembling collectiveness. Is also his work to transform it in a panorama, build it as landscape. Oso Sànchez synthetizes this task with the technique of black and white. Suddenly, this reactivated community takes its place in space, appropriates of nature y extends, swing after swing, its light among the shadow.
Marco Díaz-Güemez
Spring, 2022
nomads
Alan Buenfil
August 27 — 24September, 2022
NOMAD – ALAN BUENFIL
Nomad:
Someone in constant travel or displacement.
I have always thaught that skaters are by default different from the others and it is difficult for me to understand that there are people who have never skated in their life.
How do they do it? I don't know!
Undoubtedly there are all kinds of people inside and outside of skateboarding, but the skaters are remarkably peculiar, they do things that those of us who have been on a skateboard can understand, rules never written anywhere but understood in the common imaginary of the community, ideologies that celebrate the idea of being reather than having, brotherhood without fear of loneliness, wandering to escape a meaningless system, proposing the perfect outfit every day that pleases no one but a body that is going to fall, hurt, bleed, sweat and cry but in the end he will try the next trick that a restless mind has imagine that same morning, to finally meet a similar one who is going to propose spending the best day of your life, every day, rolling around wherever you carry the impulse to celebrate life.
César Ortega
Alan Buenfil was born in Mérida, Yucatán in 1996, he is an artist and skater.
A MEADOW AND 4 HAIKUS
alex romero
September — October 12, 2022
A meadow of sunflowers made up of nineteen panels of Japanese rice paper.
Sunflowers made with spray paint using a strainer lid as a stencil, accompanied by four haikus from different authors printed with a photoluminescent ink.
A poor tribute to Vincent and his brief passage through this dimension.
GRINBERG: ENTRIES ON THE CASE
François Bucher
Ida Cuellar
Vanessa Enriquez
Leon larregui
Sixth King
Eduardo Pacheco
November 11 — December 10, 2022
GRINBERG : ENTRIES ON THE CASE
Grinberg: entries on the case is the first part of a project where different aspects of Jacobo Grinberg ́s legacy are brought to light. Grinberg was a researcher of consciousness who disappeared without a trace in 1994. The mystery of his disappearance is also amplified: both the the intricacies of the crime investigation or the esoteric speculations around it. Through poetic explorations in form what is sought is a reinvention of the elusive memory of Jacobo. Grinberg is a name that can nowadays be understood as a code name. This code invokes an esencial question brought to anyone who approaches it: where do I position myself regarding this case? Am I inside the ring, in the multidimensional labyrinth where a man with inexplicable qualities disappears in a manner that is also inexplicable? Or am I safely installed in the periphery of this question, as the calm observer of yet another crime investigation? In any case this story is about a man whose research into the outskirts of “consensual reality” were a matter of interest to the CIA who had Grinberg ́s theories archived as secret documents in its Stargate program. Another, more archetypal, mythological plausibility that is left wide open is a story where a larger-than-life man is erased from the face of the earth by the hands of his own wife who proceeds to hide in the shadows.
LOL TUN
flower stone, bones, seeds
Lorena Ancona
LLANO in collaboration with José García
December 16 — January 28, 2023
Germination of a first seed, dark, humid and fertile interior. The cave, like a stone womb, keeps seeds and bones. Deeply protect the waters that veil the life of the earth. Timeless place, keeps bad airs, winds in the form of snakes
House of Xbakyalo in Maya k’iché (the one that makes bones or saves seeds) first mother, creator of bones. A very an- cient deity that makes seeds and bones, corn and humans flourish from within. Pawahtun is another deity related to the cave, always linked to a snail or turtle shell that supports the earth and is also a permissive figure, an old man who is commonly represented in erotic scenes accompanied by young women whom he seduces and caresses.
Limestone soils purify calcium as they pass, drops that trickle down through stalagmites. Suhuy Ha (virgin water) the collection of drops drained from cavities was highly appreciated, a common practice in caves. Accumulated in ves- sels that allude to Chak or the simile of him Tlaloc, virgin water probably considered the purest and used in rituals.
This series of stuccos explores the space of the cave as eroticism and fertility, that primitive thing that makes the cave a house, an intimate space. Sensuality that in the dark hides the primitive impulse of creation.
DREAM
randy schull
February 16 — March 23, 2023
Sueño plunges us into a deep sleep. Is there anything more serious than sleeping?
Is there a more unknown and mysterious terrain than that of dreams? When we reach the REM we enter completely foreign lands to our will. There, Randy Shull seems to take a bold and risky bet: take us to the deep ground of REM.
The hammock, a device created in the Antilles and later adapted and perfected in Yucatan, a rocket-shaped cocoon, hung horizontally that surrounds us, not only physically but also emotionally, that with a subtle rocking, lulls us to sleep. We are no longer here. We have departed to a place where everything is an unknown, occupied by primary colors and embodied in yarn of different colors. Entangled and untangled. As time goes by, we are immersing ourselves more and more in a place that is not a place.
Igniting forests, chasing nymphs, undressing dolls, also becoming Brian de Palma’s femme fatale, having a lucid dream in the Mexican Caribbean... I am/we are no longer here. Sueño continues. Everything opens like a curtain. Randy got us into Buñuel’s “Le Charme Discret de La Bourgeoisie”. Everything is so real and yet it is not. The actors of our inner life appear and disappear and you are no longer.
“Why is she still here?” Everything is out of our control. We keep...floating....taking off... going deep. Everything fades away.
We recognize characters from the pop references of our childhood elevated to sainthood. These covered characters gesture, sometimes peace, sometimes an insult, sometimes a sign of power, all covered in a dream that could also be a nightmare.
REM is completely deep in our subconscious. We float in a luminous darkness.
Where does this Sueño take us, Randy?
EVERYTHING RETURNS
Claribel Calderius
March 25 — May 05, 2023
Claribel Calderius is dream weaver, whose work invites us to explore deep thoughts and fears hidden in jute fabric. Her works reflect on the complexity of female identity and the construction of the image of women in a world that has historically been dominated by a patriarchal society.
In her fabrics, the faces seem to be screaming and evoke the same sensation and anguish as in some of An- tonia Eiriz's works. As if both bodies of work intertwine in a kind of silent dialogue, connecting the voice of two women through different mediums.
In her work, the figure of the head stands up as a recurring motif, alluding to the ritual of praying to the head in Afro-Cuban religion. The head is seen as the sanctuary of the spirit, the place where wisdom and knowledge are found. Head praying is an act that seeks to strengthen the connection with the orisha, re- ceiving his protection and guidance in life. In Calderius's creations, the heads become a symbolic represen- tation of this ritual and the longing of the human being to find a place to anchor.
Claribel's work is a testament to woman's ability to explore her own identity, to find her voice, and to ex- press her personal vision of her world, an invitation to reflection and dialogue about women, their complex- ity and their inner strength.
FIST, PALM, PULSE
Gerda Gruber
May 14 — August 13, 2023
After growing up and studying in Austria, Gerda Gruber (Bratislava, 1940) arrived in Mexico in 1975; here she found great potential for the development of clay sculpture for contemporary art. Upon her arrival, she founded the Clay Sculpture Workshop at the National School of Plastic Arts, and after a decade of training generations of sculptors in central and northern Mexico, she moved to Yucatan in 1988. Here, she found a place near the sea where she could listen to the Maya language, which impacted her sculptural career in a transcendent way. Over time, the artistic languages that Gerda Gruber has generated using materials such as metal, glass, clay, porcelain, fiber, wood, wax and bamboo, attest to the evolution of her deep contemplation of the plant world.
Fist, palm, pulse aims to exhibit works from the last two decades, which break down the ways in which the artist incorporates the environments of Mexico – from its light, shapes, volumes, colors, and even the sway of the wind – to generate unparalleled sculptural processes. With materials from her immediate surroundings, the artist recovers in her usual practice patches of vegetation that she integrates into the configuration of protective structures or shelters: a constant in her professional exploration.
Gerda Gruber's sculptural harmony shows the result of a life dedicated to artistic production and teaching. Without clinging to a unique form of exchange or didactic method, after more than 35 years, she continues to transmit her experience to new
generations and in expanded contexts. Intervening in the teaching process taking cycles and organic materials as points of departure, Gerda finds incessant inspiration in the intelligence contained in a seed.