bulto/niebla/piel by Jorge Rosano Gamboa: Curated by Christian Barragán at Project Room

The most recent series of paintings by Jorge Rosano Gamboa (Mexico City, 1984), draws its potential for synthesis and abstraction from the pre-Columbian universe. While the resulting work preserves the identity of its references, such as the pre-Hispanic cultures of central Mexico, it also cites a type of conception in painting after Minimalism and Hard Edge; a way of thinking about painting close to the style of Ellsworth Kelly. In coincidence with the New York painter, Rosano Gamboa has also explored and enriched his pictorial practice from his experience in the fields of photography, sculpture, and drawing, taking the translation of media beyond the interdisciplinary practice. With this approach, Rosano Gamboa creates a work that wanders freely from the concept of approximation, or as Kelly once commented, "seeing something and then translating how I see it."

For his first individual presentation at Saenger Galería, Jorge Rosano Gamboa has developed an unpublished project that consists of a new series of paintings that originate in the two-dimensionality of drawing (with color fields and well-defined contours that fragment and isolate the exposed image), and that appeal to the volumetric nature of the body represented in idols and pre-Hispanic objects (in such a way that the density of the oil-stick placed on the linen evokes a mass or flesh similar to that of clay, or the polished surface of a volcanic stone). Hence the title of the exhibition, since its more than an approach to drawing and sculpture from painting, including that impossibility of a certainty or white noise that is fog.

Additionally, Rosano Gamboa's current work continues to investigate the artist's interest in time materialized in artifacts that have a historical and psycho-affective irradiation. In accordance with the focus and intention of the works, the image gallery of this exhibition includes multifaceted Mexica deities irreducible to a single condition, such as Xochipilli, Mictlantecuhtli and Xipe Tótec (representations related to the rituals that promote both life and death through various avatars: the flower, the song, the underworld, the seed, the skinning and the corn) ,and which we recognize in Rosano Gamboa's painting by some of its characteristics, as he approaches and sees: the toothed pectoral in Xochipilli, the navel-fruit in Mictlantecuhtli and the detachment of the skin in Xipe Tótec. In any case, the work gathered in “lump/fog/skin” by Jorge Rosano Gamboa revolves around creations that summon our amazement from their mystery.