Pintura Enojada

CDMX, Mexico

Pintura enojada

23 Nov 2024 – 25 Jan 2025

Lia D Castro, Manuel Solano, Simón Sepúlveda, Pérez y Requena, Ángel Cammen,

Sofía Bassi, Aureliano Alvarado Faesler, Abraham González Pacheco

With the locomotive everything went down the drain. William Turner (1775-1851), fascinated by the steam and smoke of the engines, was confronted with an atmosphere that academy painting, as he had learned it, could not represent. This, together with photography, led painting into the difficult abyss of irrelevance. Where are we if we no longer represent? Well, in a strange place, where the gesture becomes determinant and is retained as a fossil action, a place at once sinister and comfortable, deceptive and certain. Turner passed from his wild sea to the evanescent atmospheres in such a way that the History of Art (there were surely many others) presents him to us as the premodern artist, that strange selection of men and loose names, who seem to press the button after which there is no turning back. After him, the impressionists, the post, the fauvists and the cubists, all of them children of a bourgeoisie from which they want to escape again and again to dynamite their comfortable images, their linear narration of time. Accompanying the poster of this exhibition is a fragment of a work by Luis Coto (1830-1851) La colegiata de Guadalupe, in which the Toluca born painter presents the amiable encounter between tradition and modernity, a locomotive arrives at the foot of the basilica almost without smoke, framed by a landscape that is more European than Mexican. A world supposedly in order, the world he was taught to paint. There is little smoke, only a plume that seems to say “no big deal”. But it was. Speed, the machine, changed time and representing it became, and still is today, an obsession. We took the title, Angry Painting, from an expression of Manuel Solano: and these angry paintings came to me because I did not want to forget what I had seen, no one who participates in this exhibition seems to want to forget anything. All the works travel the unctuous road of identity sustained in memory and here, great paradox, painting becomes more true than photography, it does not want to be a collective memory, it does not want to be interpreted, it is shown as it is constructed, raw and stark, from memory to canvas, to board, to cement. Perez y Requena work with the drawings of others, which they found in a swarm of brothels and bars in what was a parallel infrastructure to the port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife at the crossroads between Europe and America, one of those bastard places where everything and nothing resonates at the same time. Let’s put an end to the tyranny of Leon Battista Alberti! The modernists shouted, he killed the possibilities of painting by imposing perspective, the pre-Raphaelites sentenced and to that place Abraham Gonzalez Pacheco returns, not without irony, to the convent of the Augustinians of Malinalco, to its frescoes that tear out a timeline of their own, which skips modernity, in order to create his own, one in which to relocate himself safely away from essentialism.

Because, after the 19th century, painting struggles between finding the primitive, the existence of a universal perceptive theory and the radical expression of individuality. Thus, Aureliano Alvarado Faesler designs a device almost as a response to Luís Coto. Is this landscape painting? It is, just as Guernica is as much a history painting as the frescoes on the staircase of the Chapultepec Castle or the postmodern Mexico of Manuel Solano‘s Liverpool. Thus, Aureliano forces us to place ourselves in the middle of a diorama in what looks like a nocturnal approach to the immeasurable Mexico City, and asks once again a recurring question in painting: how to represent the totality of the object when painting cannot submit to anything other than itself, resorting again and again to history. It is here that Lia D Castro presents a brief history of art, one that dislocates the body, from Courbet’s Origin of the World to Duchamp’s Étant Donnés. In that sense Juan Downey wondered in his 1981 video The Looking Glass, in front of the Venus in the mirror – with what certainty can we be sure that what we see is nothing more than what we need to believe. Because painting engages in a game of multiple times, presenting a prism that links past and future, but with very little interest in the present, just as Simón Sepúlveda and Ángel Cammen do. Both resort to an almost cinematographic idea of painting that sinks its roots in a field of experimentation, as occurred in the furious baroque painting and in which the scenes reflect the tension between what has happened and what is about to happen, like a matryoshka that must be opened again and again to constantly find a different character. 

Turner, painted fires before smoke, the flame that devours everything and makes tabula rasa. Perhaps Angry Painting is there burning everything to start all over again.