Clareou by Alfredo Gallegos Mena: at Project Room

SAENGER GALERÍA is pleased to present Clareou, the first solo exhibition by Mexican artist Alfredo Gallegos Mena. Housed in the Sala de Proyectos with a curatorship of Christian Barragán, this exhibition brings together unpublished works corresponding to different series in which the use of unusual materials, techniques and precepts predominates in the tradition of painting. At the same time, the artist has named the exhibition and the central body that makes it up according to a Brazilian musical genre and according to certain compositions that are particularly significant in the development of his life and work during the last five years. This choice translates into an affectively tenacious vision and a rigorous and experimental exercise of art that could be said with the expression “don't let painting die”.

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“Right now I find myself trying to figure out when 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? My current exercise is born in opposition to the dominant idea of believing that painting is made from the materials that have traditionally been used and that the difference lies in the theme. In response to this convention, I try to make the painting the opposite and therefore the subject is the same or even none. I am looking for a work where painting is the objective itself, in which from the beginning of the process I am speaking in pictorial terms and not about materials and techniques for painting. A work in which, in the end, what remains mounted on the support is the result of a pictorial construction. And even more, a painting in which everything from the name to the surface is pictorial matter.

For this exhibition I wanted to get away from the elements and methods that are regularly used in painting and invented my own version based on encaustic. Wax is a material that has caught my attention because it is malleable and it melts with heat as well as hardens with cold; on fire it becomes transparent and bright and on cooling it becomes dark and opaque. Added to this matter is the cube, on a small scale, pigmented with a single color on each occasion, which shapes the central works of this exhibition. Together, wax and cube allow the creation of sequences, contrasts, inversions, variations and other manifestations of chance and order, of ideas and pictorial intentions different from the canon.

Right now I find myself trying to make painting from painting.”

— Alfredo Gallegos Mena