Saenger Galeria is pleased to announce the solo presentation of artist Alfredo Gallegos Mena in Salon Acme No. 10, February 9-12, 2023 at Proyecto Público Prim.
For this occasion, Gallegos Mena continued to develop his most recent line of work with pigmented wax, Construcción Pictórica Materia, which was first shown in his solo exhibition Clareou last year at the Sala de Proyectos at Saenger Galería. In this series, the artist explores the possibilities of the material used, as well as a free form of assemblage. The first works of this research, titled after certain compositions of the Brazilian musical genre Samba, achieve a fusion of painting and sculpture; they are constructions that consciously approach painting from the volume and are located in a liminal space beyond one medium or the other.
Since 2019, Alfredo Gallegos Mena's exercise has been consistent in the introduction of elements foreign to the traditional practices of painting and sculpture. Consequently, his process resides in the creation of hybrid works from materials that have been transmuted from their original condition, such as clay, wood, wax, avocado skin, old matchsticks, fabrics exposed to the effects of sunlight and various components used in artistic restoration. In this type of creations, which reject the rationality of the abstract geometric and yet require a rigorous order in terms of inventive quality, each intervened material is considered a source of information. The result is a practice that constantly surpasses the conventional restrictions of material, technique and medium; in response, Gallegos Mena involves in his dynamics a variety of methods and resources in which he emphasizes a sober and liberating expression.
In this regard, the artist has stated: "At this moment I am trying to resolve at what point painting becomes painting. What happens if a painting does not mix colors, or does not have transparencies or glazes? Are there paintings within a painting? Or outside of it? I am looking for a work where painting is the objective itself, in which from the beginning of the process I am talking in pictorial terms and not about materials and painting techniques. A work in which at the end what is mounted on the support is the result of a pictorial construction. And even more, a painting in which from the name to the surface everything is pictorial matter".
In this sense, the second body of work of the series Pictorial Construction Matter that the spectator will be able to see in Acme Salon No. 10, accentuates the use of juxtapositions, unions and assemblages between the various components (wax, wood, pigments, surface, density, gloss and text of the titles), taking full advantage of the chromatic, olfactory, volumetric and semantic qualities of the materials. Additionally, the images resulting from these constructions move even more decisively away from historical references ranging from Latin American geometric abstraction and postminimalism, to the Mexican muralism of O'Gorman, Mérida or Chávez Morado. In contrast, the work of Alfredo Gallegos Mena is a concentrated and collected exercise, in contained dimensions and in search of an environment of his own.
— Christian Barragán
