Estar na corda bamba | Error inestable by Alfredo Gallegos Mena: Curated by Christian Barragán
Saenger Galería is pleased to present in its Main Hall Estar na corda bamba | Error inestable, the largest solo exhibition of the artist Alfredo Gallegos Mena since his debut solo show in 2022 in collaboration with Saenger. Coincidentally, this exhibition takes place during the celebration of the gallery's sixth anniversary, which began its activities in May 2019, founded by Bernardo Saenger and Javier Vázquez Mellado.
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With Estar na corda bamba | Error inestable, Alfredo Gallegos Mena (Mexico City, 1991) continues his affinity for Brazilian culture, particularly the language used by speakers in daily life, which is closely tied to the music of Samba and the philosophy of life conveyed through its songs, and which has a strong impact on social and cultural spheres. He is also drawn to the pictorial and poetic facets of the concrete-constructivist movement in Brazil. Evidence of this deep interest is the artist’s choice to use expressions from the subgenre Samba de Roda and everyday oral traditions to name his works and projects, as is the case with this current show, which takes its title from the phrase Estar na corda bamba. This expression is used to indicate an unstable situation that requires careful and complex control; a proverb might convey it as “He who risks the abyss has already conquered the fall.”
At the same time, this exhibition, which brings together for the first time a new and broad body of work from five series identified by particular materials—wax, clay, lime, matchboxes, and metal oxide—the artist invokes a second title in Spanish, Error inestable, to signify that his practice goes beyond mere translation. Instead, he opts for a method that relies on approximation and acceptance as integral strategies in his creative process. As the artist himself explains: “Each of the series included in this exhibition I began because of the need to experiment with different materials and their sensitive potential, without knowing in advance the result I would achieve, while contemplating the possibility that chance and error would emerge during the process, which are welcome and give the work a crucial character.”
By drawing a parallel with the Brazilian concrete movement, Alfredo Gallegos Mena questions the pedagogy and practice of art and painting: “What makes painting, painting? Is it its materiality, the techniques employed, the history that precedes it and is reaffirmed in each act?” In response to this question, the artist acknowledges that his practice is motivated by a constant curiosity about the praxis, the critical act that makes possible that art which falls within the domain of the concrete, the everyday, and the domestic, including the large and small adversities that the simple, common circumstances of contemporary life entail: “What happens in the wax painting series is that the temperature changes within the materials or the environment, the drying times, the application of irregular forms within geometric bodies, the dexterity or failure of my hand and the tool I use, all guide the development of the work. The same occurs with the matchbox and clay series, where the wear of the paper, the imprecision of the cut, the fragmentation of graphic and chromatic information, the resistance of the mask which causes disparity between cubes, or the uneven adherence of smoke on the surface, all of these errors express the uniqueness that intrigues me to discover at each moment.” From this peculiar philosophy of human things, Alfredo Gallegos Mena extracts a creative working system composed of continuous phases of search, discovery, transformation, and learning that go “from beginning to end and from end to beginning.”
Ph. Ramiro Chaves
