Afterimage by Rachel Hellmann: Curated by Christian Barragán at Project Room

SAENGER Galería presents Afterimage, Rachel Hellmann’s second individual exhibition in Mexico. The exhibition articulates three bodies of work, strongly correlated with each other, where a series of fabric pieces hand-sewn on sheets of Dura-Lar and some paintings on paper and wood that were inspired by them dialogue, ranging from two-dimensional support to sculptural.

The works included in Afterimage allow the artist to continue investigating the perception of light from different viewing angles provided by the materials used and the process that each of these requires, such as the superimposition of the transparent Dura–Lar film, the assembly of different textures through manual sewing or the wooden construction of frames with shape and relief inspired by the results obtained in pictorial collages. Regarding her creation process, Hellmann has said: “I constructed the sewn works as if they were paintings but using fabric, colored papers, and threads. Starting to work with pre-existing materials represented a different type of problem solving. I built in a way that responded to a conversation between folds, stitches, and planes of color. Using a sewing machine, needle, and thread, I built the works from the front surface and later created very superficial reliefs that make the work oscillate between sculpture and drawing.”

Textiles function similarly with their marriage of utility and meaning. In both paper and wood paintings and sewn works, the artist combines these worlds using simplified angular forms that evoke geometry and precision with the materiality of the domestic; In this whole set, the union of the hand and the machine is present, as well as the sentimental and the formal. The fabrics and textures they provide are also a gateway to memory and personal experience. Added to this, the nuances of color absorption and reflection make the work visual, tactile, and experiential. The interaction of light on surfaces is the fundamental impulse in Rachel Hellmann's work, “the action of seeing, pausing and absorbing something non-verbally is what interests me most when creating art.”

Afterimage is the most recent evidence of this desire, in which the experience is not only visual but subsequent to the image, it is spatial, tactile, and mnemonic, and arises from an ordered form that travels the limits between sculpture, painting and drawing.

— Christian Barragán