This 8th Material edition is very special for everyone, going back to the fairs is one more step to recover our work and future. Our booth wants to be able to bring a selection of our program to the fair visitor.
With this presentation we want to show our maturity as a gallery, how our artists who were emerging are already established artists and how we continue betting on new artists to continue providing freshness and plurality.
Machete reflects a part of the contemporary circuit of the city that has its audience and community beyond the parameters of the mainstream.
In these works, Andrea Villalón continues examining her identity through memory and the physical spaces she inhabits. Her works function as records of personal events, books she reads, the food she eats, the city she lives in, her friends, and personal belongings.
“I tremble and no one hears. The light from lamp post number seven follows me down the path that little by little becomes a sidewalk. I carry on my shoulders the dead weight of a cold blue bubble. As I approach post number eight, I turn to see the sky. A thunderbolt seems to shake the town’s deepest foundations. I remember the vision I had at noon and I pause. The view before me doesn’t reveal what the earth hides.” – Abraham González Pacheco
For Japanese Buddhism, bonsai reflects a harmonious relationship between nature and man. It is a practice that demonstrates the possibility of manipulating and controlling nature with respect and without harming it. Bonsai also reaffirms the inherent will in living beings to exist and adapt, even when their condition has been artificially restricted and imposed. In this technique, the tree stays alive despite being confined to a container that forces it to change shape. Humans are also in a constant process of adaptation, especially due to changes and situations that we ourselves generate.
Berruecos’s work is usually linked to these impositions and often unnoticed social and political situations that, however, do not affect deeply.
In the “BONSAI” series, Berruecos will make a series of metal photographs that portray the bonsai tree collection of his uncle, Dr. José Manuel Berruecos, who is considered a pioneer in the genetic engineering of animals in Mexico.
Based on these ideas, this series of works proposes a reflection on the cultural practices that are related to nature and its manipulation.
A Self of Herself reflects on the elasticity of the natural and the forms of representation that arise in it’s path with humanity. Even now that most of humanity’s present is engulf with the exploitation of other entities, the natural stands and exist on its own aside from anthropocentric interactions.
The metallic silhouettes are laser cuts that draw inspiration from pre-hispanic clay “stamps” which have appeared in different cultures and times in pre-colonial Mexico. They usually depict geometric designs, flora and fauna, and they have been reimagi- ned and modified by the artist to create a composition which is activated by different elements in environment. The installation resorts to time in two different forms: the immediate interaction with the sun, in which its daily movement provokes the shapes to cast different shadows, generating a graphic composition in the surface they stand. Secondly, a longer temporality, in which the interaction of the surrounding elements with the objects oxidizes them, slightly modifying their shapes, inscribing time on the objects themselves.
A Self of Herself reflects on the elasticity of the natural and the forms of representa- tion that arise in it’s path with humanity. Even now that most of humanity’s present is engulf with the exploitation of other entities, the natural stands and exist on its own aside from anthropocentric interactions.
In Pompeii, a Roman city that buried the Mount Vesuvius Volcano in the year 79, there were many houses that housed frescoes on their walls, images on the floor mosaics and graffiti. A thousand stories of families and their pets, plants, food, insects, parties, births, deaths, invented stories, relatives of the past and the infinite possibilities of the future.
Inspired by these houses in Pompeii, which had names like “The House of the Tragic Poet” or “The House of the Gold Bracelet”, I imagine this new house with the name “The House of Broken Time”, where I go through every corner of space and portrait everything I see, combined with the eternal exercise of questioning reality and time.
I start this new series with the entrance of the house; two paintings of “CAVE CANEM” or Watch out for the dog.
(A dog was written and painted at the entrances of Roman houses and villas to warn that there was a potentially dangerous dog inside.), giving importance both to protecting the family that lives in a house, and to taking care of our body and spirit, who are our home.
This painting opens a new chapter of the series “Eternal Fire” featuring the burning consciences of María Conejo. This chapter is “The Purification,” It takes place before everything turns into ashes.
This fire is not an ordinary fire; it’s a fire that allows transmutation. It is a fire in which the headless ones burn with pleasure, and the spectators are the trees that, in the fulminating heat, germinate flowers of fire that illuminate, extend their branches like arms that caress accomplices of the scorching fire.
“My artistic practice is a constant narrative. I have the feeling that I started a small fire months ago, and just like a spark in a bush does, that fire is now an uncontrollable, blazing fire.” – María Conejo
“Each stone can hold messages, small objects that are from this natural world, or whatever comes to mind. I invite you to think of something you want to share with the river. These messages or objects will be encapsulated in other stones that will be returned to the river that is next to my workshop. For me, this action is a way to communicate with another dimension.
Events happen in the river that may not be perceived by our human eye. His time is different from ours. I don’t know what will happen to these messages. Maybe someo- ne will find them tomorrow or in thousands of years. Or perhaps they are destroyed over time… What remains is the feeling of having communicated with an entity that goes beyond us.” – Paula Cortazar
