Radio Solar by Sebastián Hidalgo: at Project Room
Past exhibition
Overview
SAENGER Galería presents Radio Solar, the first solo exhibition by Mexican artist Sebastián Hidalgo (Puebla, 1985) at the gallery's current location in the historic neighborhood of Tacubaya. The exhibition is made up of a group of unpublished works, including paintings, drawings and a small installation, created during the last few years, from 2019 to the present; a period that includes the appearance of the Covid-19 pandemic and its still-present consequences, events that provide the background to the core story outlined in Hidalgo's exhibition.
Installation Views
Press release
SAENGER Galería presents Radio Solar, the first solo exhibition by Mexican artist Sebastián Hidalgo (Puebla, 1985) at the gallery's current location in the historic neighborhood of Tacubaya. The exhibition is made up of a group of unpublished works, including paintings, drawings and a small installation, created during the last few years, from 2019 to the present; a period that includes the appearance of the Covid-19 pandemic and its still-present consequences, events that provide the background to the core story outlined in Hidalgo's exhibition.
Sebastián Hidalgo's practice revolves around drawing and painting, essentially; or more precisely, around painting and drawing of an objective nature, hence the sculptural presence of his work. Through simple and common materials such as oil, charcoal, ink, graphite, colored pencils, marble, wood, cotton, linen and paper, Hidalgo develops an oeuvre in which he explores both a knowledge of a sensitive order (a favorite subject of Eastern philosophies) and a visual thought (a distinguished attribute of poetry and mysticism). See Marble Key, a work from 2019 composed of a small wooden shelf and a regular fragment of marble that on the front has tiny black dots drawn on it. Although almost imperceptible, the drawing made by the artist resembles at first glance the natural erosion of the stone, with which more than an intervention or alteration of the object, his creative act becomes an integration to the natural order of things. The visual and sensorial sense is reinforced by the layer of dust that has accumulated on the surface of the artifact in its transit through the artist's studio, first, and in the exhibition space now. In this work, as in the drawing Cryptovegetation (2021) or in the painting that gives its name to the exhibition, Solar Radio (2021), there is no rhetorical resource, not even metaphorical, but an intention of correspondence, of linking the potential of association of the elements that constitute the work and give it an entity in itself, albeit multiple and even mutable.
In the manner of a high fountain, in Radio Solar Sebastián Hidalgo makes his own that verse by Apollinaire, "oh sun, it is the time of burning reason", and delivers us a meticulous work that, from the choice of his materials and their use through the accumulation of layers of material, sensorial, symbolic and visual information, meditates equally on human existence and the presence of art. Following the French poet, Hidalgo contemplates (radially) the still present conditions of confinement and parole and, from his experience at the edge of the metropolis, gives us some news about "the old and the new", "what a solitary man can know of such things"; and in doing so, he takes us (solarly) into "strange domains / where mystery germinates". Attentive to the surrounding noise and despair, and against the lurking tedium and banality, Sebastián Hidalgo's work reminds us that "there is time to banish / and time to return".
Intuitively, the image of Radio Solar's invitation is a drawing entitled Adiósmundo (Goodbye World); dated January 2020, it prefigures a future that is now our present. The rest of the work that makes up Sebastián Hidalgo's exhibition has, consequently, the implicit intention of being a witness and testimony of the changes that have shaken the world since then; a circular, radial and solar account of the events that are still taking place. In that fleeting gesture (the raised hand, on the side of the face that looks with surprise), the character of Goodbye World encrypts at the same time a farewell and a welcome greeting: a sign, incandescent red, that refers us to destruction and regeneration.
Sebastián Hidalgo's practice revolves around drawing and painting, essentially; or more precisely, around painting and drawing of an objective nature, hence the sculptural presence of his work. Through simple and common materials such as oil, charcoal, ink, graphite, colored pencils, marble, wood, cotton, linen and paper, Hidalgo develops an oeuvre in which he explores both a knowledge of a sensitive order (a favorite subject of Eastern philosophies) and a visual thought (a distinguished attribute of poetry and mysticism). See Marble Key, a work from 2019 composed of a small wooden shelf and a regular fragment of marble that on the front has tiny black dots drawn on it. Although almost imperceptible, the drawing made by the artist resembles at first glance the natural erosion of the stone, with which more than an intervention or alteration of the object, his creative act becomes an integration to the natural order of things. The visual and sensorial sense is reinforced by the layer of dust that has accumulated on the surface of the artifact in its transit through the artist's studio, first, and in the exhibition space now. In this work, as in the drawing Cryptovegetation (2021) or in the painting that gives its name to the exhibition, Solar Radio (2021), there is no rhetorical resource, not even metaphorical, but an intention of correspondence, of linking the potential of association of the elements that constitute the work and give it an entity in itself, albeit multiple and even mutable.
In the manner of a high fountain, in Radio Solar Sebastián Hidalgo makes his own that verse by Apollinaire, "oh sun, it is the time of burning reason", and delivers us a meticulous work that, from the choice of his materials and their use through the accumulation of layers of material, sensorial, symbolic and visual information, meditates equally on human existence and the presence of art. Following the French poet, Hidalgo contemplates (radially) the still present conditions of confinement and parole and, from his experience at the edge of the metropolis, gives us some news about "the old and the new", "what a solitary man can know of such things"; and in doing so, he takes us (solarly) into "strange domains / where mystery germinates". Attentive to the surrounding noise and despair, and against the lurking tedium and banality, Sebastián Hidalgo's work reminds us that "there is time to banish / and time to return".
Intuitively, the image of Radio Solar's invitation is a drawing entitled Adiósmundo (Goodbye World); dated January 2020, it prefigures a future that is now our present. The rest of the work that makes up Sebastián Hidalgo's exhibition has, consequently, the implicit intention of being a witness and testimony of the changes that have shaken the world since then; a circular, radial and solar account of the events that are still taking place. In that fleeting gesture (the raised hand, on the side of the face that looks with surprise), the character of Goodbye World encrypts at the same time a farewell and a welcome greeting: a sign, incandescent red, that refers us to destruction and regeneration.
