luego la forma

Luego la Forma, Galeria de Arte Mexicano Sala: GAM , Mexico City 09/2019 – 01/2020

An addendum on the immaterial.

The exhibition Luego la Forma, this fall at Galería de Arte Mexicano, elucidates on a process native to the plastic arts, the conjuring of the empirical from the intangible. The show weaves together the practices of Ramiro Chaves, Yeni Mao, Fabiola Menchelli, and Alejandra Venegas. The practices tease out drawings, paintings, sculptures or photos from the gooey transitional space between source and realization.

Venegas translates her surrounding landscape, processing it through the deceptive simplicity of gesture and mark-making. The works are an experiential reaction, digesting the landscape and pushing it through the automatic path from eye to hand. Also in conversation with his surroundings, Chaves uses multiple hands and multiple frames of reference. The cooperative works layer space and expression, a testimony to collective consciousness. Instead of creating environmental space like other large work, the seemingly endless scroll becomes a document of the process.

Concerned with the elemental nature of light as a defining force, Menchelli uses the incorporeality of light not only as a process but as a subject matter. The photos are about the photography, creating a feedback system that hums with mysticism, astronomy, and science fiction. In a similar closed-loop, Mao approaches the incorporeal through the mediation of embodiment. He works with architectonic suggestiveness, constructing a cyborg body solely through the surrounding framework. Various components and visual languages- expressions of craft, material building systems and modes of display- provide a sounding board of information.

This show is about process as expression, a physicality birthed from an impression, the form shaped from an ethereal whiff. The works decipher the way in which form is made. These practices are each an elucidation, a paraphrase, a decoding.