Ahí donde quiebra el camino by Jorge Rosano Gamboa
Ahí donde quiebra el camino
Jorge Rosano Gamboa
The volcanoes precede us and will outlast us; they are presences we share with other ages of the Earth and with those who once inhabited it. The landscape of the Valley of Mexico and its surroundings—framed by the Iztaccíhuatl and the Popocatépetl—is the conceptual and emotional point of departure for Ahí donde quierba el camino. In this exhibition, Jorge Rosano Gamboa expands his exploration of image and matter, derived from his interest in what he calls photographic thought: a way of understanding reality through light, time, and revelation. Here, without abandoning his attention to form and the magic of transmutation, his gaze shifts toward the landscape. Rather than representing the environment, Rosano Gamboa conjures it: his works become spaces of revelation where the landscape appears—through matter, through perception, and through memory.
The body of work—paintings, sculptures, tapestries, and a papel picado installation—maps out an affective territory where Rosano’s artistic practice unfolds as a reflection on the image and its modes of manifestation. Each piece participates in a single gesture: that of making visible what occurs between matter and perception.
His work is woven together with the world of craftsmanship that has accompanied him since childhood. Through his parents’ handicraft shop in Tepoztlán, he became familiar with the country’s diverse techniques and the stories that sustain them: tales of nahuales, rituals, and mythologies that connect the human with the natural and the supernatural, the visible with the invisible. This material and collective memory runs through his practice and manifests in his experimentation with textile techniques, mineral pigments, fibers, and stone carving. From these collaborations, vocabularies emerge that operate between the visual and the tactile, between object and gesture.
In his paintings, color behaves as a relational phenomenon, in dialogue with Josef Albers’s explorations, where the perception of one hue depends on those surrounding it and on the surface it occupies. Rosano heightens this relationship by applying pigment directly to the canvas with oil sticks, without blending or layering colors. His palette—composed mainly of earthy and mineral tones—evokes a connection to the processes of the earth: color as living matter that reacts to light.
These paintings engage with the tradition of landscape in Mexico from an atmospheric dimension. Rather than representing a territory, they evoke it as a perceptual experience: compositional structures that allude to horizons and strata, to distances and densities that merge within color. They resonate with a memory of the Valley of Mexico—between José María Velasco’s scientific observation and Dr. Atl’s bodily experience—yet transposed to an interior plane, where the perception of landscape is also a form of remembering.
In this movement, the paintings of Etel Adnan offer a parallel key of interpretation: small surfaces where color becomes thought, where each form—a mountain, a sun, a horizon—condenses the experience of time and place. In Rosano, as in Adnan, the landscape becomes a way of writing with color, a space where emotion, territory, and perception intertwine. Both understand landscape as an extension of consciousness—a sensitive geography.
The exhibition also introduces the image of the road as a metaphor for both movement and rootedness. In this liminal space, the landscape is experienced in motion—as flow and constant transformation: the volcano’s fumaroles, the clouds, the rain. How can one capture the ephemeral nature of such shifting forms? In this pursuit, the artist approaches the figure of the contemporary shaman, one who mediates between the visible and the invisible, between matter and light.
In this way Donde quiebra el camino stands at the threshold between image and matter, between earth and light. Each work functions as a point of inflection where the landscape transforms—where seeing becomes remembering, and color—like the volcanoes—seems to contain within itself the mystery of time. On one side lies the distant landscape of the mountains, of the ever-present volcanoes; on the other, the roadside landscape, the path that tells stories and quickly recedes from view, leaving behind imprints of scenes we barely recognize. This liminal space—between distance and passage, between the focused and the fleeting gaze—is the territory that Jorge Rosano Gamboa’s works inhabit and evoke: a place where looking becomes a ritual gesture, a way of holding the landscape.
-Paola Santos Coy
Special acknowledgments to paper-cut artist Danny Pedro Mauricio Bonilla, textile master José Mendoza, Raul Mirlo, Mauricio Orduña, Hugo Robledo, and Carlos Alexis Chacón y Reséndiz.
