Ebriedad Geométrica

EBRIEDAD GEOMÉTRICA
A project curated by Michel Blancsubé, Eduardo Luque y Bernardo Saenger

Casa Limantour

Alejandro Almanza Pereda – Francis Alÿs – Tania Bello – Will Berry – Lucas Cantú – Damien
Daufresne – Ale de la Puente – Víctor del Oral – Valentina Díaz – Rodolfo Díaz Cervantes – Sébastien Dosantos Capouet – Alfredo Gallegos Mena – Arturo Hernández Alcázar – Robert Janitz – Perla Krauze – Gaspard Le Guen – Chavis Marmol – Carlos H. Matos – Raúl Mirlo – Daniel Monroy Cuevas – Irak Morales – Yoshua Okón – Daphane Park – Claudia Peña Salinas – Calixto Ramírez – Pablo Rasgado – Marco Rountree – Alan Sierra – Benjamín Torres – Iván Trueta

Ebriedad Geométrica evokes the emotion produced by the contemplation of forms. According to Vincent Fleury, it has Platonic origins. The Iraqi poet Abdul Kader El Janabi considers it the prerogative of sorcerers. For a long time, Latin American art has been said to be divided between the conceptual and geometric abstraction. Perhaps, in these times of widespread confusion, what we need is more intoxication. That it be geometric might appeal to devotees of mathematics—a form of poetry—since both, each in their own way, manage to distract us from the inevitable.

“Anything but painting (Todo menos Pintura)” was the initial idea imposed on the selection of works for the exhibition. While some pieces seem to ignore this initial restriction and thus verge on transgression (Will Berry, Sébastien Dosantos Capouet), others feed into a relatively recent rhetorical tendency in art discourse that describes certain works as paintings made with materials other than oil, gouache, and all the products historically associated with what is known as painting. One might think, for example, of the compositions by Arturo Hernández Alcázar made with printer’s blemishes, or the cancellation of wall coverings carried out by Pablo Rasgado, among others. It is amusing to see, in this gathering of around thirty artists, an attempt to escape the pictorial hegemony that the art market has been experiencing for several years. The three instigators of this essentially theoretical and rhetorical inebriation are not averse to painting—quite the contrary—but they wished to try doing without it for the duration of an exhibition, somewhat in the spirit of Georges Perec, who in 1969 published a novel, A Void, without using the letter e, one of the most common letters in the French language.

To indicate an itinerary through Casa Limantour, or to aspire to connect all the proposals through a unifying discourse around a shared theme, would—given the very way this selection has been constructed—be to take the world as a joke. Each of the three curators made their choices according to their own desires, which the other two respected.

This exhibition reflects—if it were still necessary—the artistic exuberance of a country situated between a north tormented by its demons and a south oscillating between frustrated emancipation and enforced submission.

— Michel Blancsubé