Piedritas bajo la Almohada: Curated by Christian Barragán at Casa Siza
Saenger Galería presents Spanish artist Alain Urrutia's first solo show in Mexico, Piedritas bajo la Almohada (Pebbles under the pillow), an exhibition that kicks off Saenger Galería’s curatorial program at Casa Siza.
In the framework of a residency he completed in Mexico this summer, Alain Urrutia (Bilbao, 1981) has developed an unpublished body of work in which he continues to employ his characteristic pictorial style and format, mostly achromatic small scale-works; as well as his choice to abstract images from a reality that hybridizes the digital and the analog in a permanently voracious and unstable state. And while his pace of work and analysis is fast and exhausting, the brevity of his works appeals to an intermittent state of contemplation and introspection.
Urrutia has made travel (in its multiple potentialities: real, imaginary and dreamlike) the main theme of this exhibition. In his words: “The exhibition project ‘Piedritas bajo la Almohada’ takes its title from Mauricio Rosencof’s book and suggests an introspective journey towards past dreams. The title evokes the idea of being able to find the way back to those dreams. Like the pebbles that Hansel and Gretel scattered so as not to get lost in the forest, the pebbles in these paintings guide us towards the path of our own dreams. In this context, the large-format painting, which recreates the landscape of the ‘Pando’ exhibition (Mexico City, 2019), becomes a point of reference, representing the place where dreams have their origin and where everything dreamed of happens.”
In the daily journey that Urrutia has turned his painting into, the groups of works that repeat an image (with its singularities) stand out, and that arranged by him in the exhibition space recreate unexpected walks for visitors. He has also collaborated with other artists, writers and cultural agents in the management of exhibitions and the publication of books (his 2020 catalogue “Mirror Rim” is an exceptional palindromic object). Special mention should be made of the exhibitions carried out in dialogue with the work of the Italian master Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890-1964). Another example, present in this exhibition, is the inclusion of a small painting by the Mexican artist Javier Peláez (1976); in whom Urrutia finds a resonance on the other side of the Atlantic and which, like a quote, opens the possibility of other paths within the drift proposed in Piedritas bajo la Almohada. Like a visual echo, the artist and his work absorb the noise in their daily coming and going through the world (as well as between the imaginary placed in history and through the inexhaustible source of dreams), to then, reverberate for a moment, with calm and frugality.
— Christian Barragán
