Mexico City: Arturo Buitron to the "Easy Life"By Ronda Kaysen
Published: April 4, 2007
 
Photo courtesy Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm
Fernando Andriacci, "Felino PA III" (2007). On view at Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm
Photo courtesy Galeria Metropolitana
María José Lavín, "Mar de asfalto (Sea of Asphalt)" (2004). On view at Galeria Metropolitana
GALLERY EXHIBITIONS
Casa de Cultura Jesus Reyes Heroles The first thing I noticed when I stepped into Arturo Buitron’s exhibition “Landscape Without a Horizon” was how much it didn’t belong. Salsa music wafted into the gallery from another room in the bucolic Casa de Cultura Jesus Reyes Heroles, and the windows peeked out at the quaint Coyoacan neighborhood. While the surroundings were pastoral and pleasant, the Mexican artist’s paintings portrayed a bleak, post-apocalyptic world, full of dark industrial tones and aerial views of a blighted, scarred earth. Character and Territory was a large encaustic on fabric work showing a dark, stormy sky painted in black and gray against a brown, unforgiving landscape. Hovering above the landscape there was a silhouette of a torso made of computer chips. Faceless and humorless, the silhouette appears to be gazing down on the emptiness below. However, most of Buitron’s somber paintings do not use electronic scrap. To the South of Chinampas portrays another barren landscape using only thick brush strokes of burnt orange and muddy green against a dark blue-green background. The title references a Mesoamerican form of agriculture, and as I gazed at the painting, I imagined farmland as seen from above—only this scene was following a massive firestorm. It felt jarring to reemerge from the gallery into the afternoon sun and the Jesus Reyes Heroles sculpture garden. But as much as Buitron’s work felt out of place here, the contrast between the two worlds was all the more poignant. ---------------
Centro de
Cultura Casa Lamm In the bustling Roma Norte neighborhood you will find Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm, a sprawling gallery space built inside a gorgeous 1911 mansion. Fernando Andriacci’s latest show, “Fuego Central,” is tucked into the lower gallery at the center, and his world of color and fantasy practically bursts out of the space. The young Oaxacan artist’s work harks back to childhood, using simple geometrical designs and familiar, reassuring forms. Stepping into the display is like tumbling into a children’s book of goofy animals and floating shapes. Fish, elephants and other giddy creatures appear often in Andriacci’s work, gliding across canvases and sculptures alike. In The Happy Ones, it’s a pair of vase-shaped objects with bobble heads, bulging eyes and outsize ears atop round-bellied bodies with arms made of crosses. Elsewhere, there are sculptures of a crocodile with jaw agape, a cricket poised to leap and a grinning elephant, all etched with smiling faces and geometric shapes. Meanwhile, in the center’s upper gallery, Mexico City artist Virginia Chevez presents a radically different collection called “Lotus Mantra.” Her sepia-toned oil on linen abstract paintings remind me of a modern take on cave paintings. Abstract forms move swiftly across the foreground of gold-flecked canvases. In Go to the Other Shore, a cream-colored center spreads outward, while rusty brush strokes mar the light, appearing like birds bursting from a tree. In all of Chevez’s work, the painting itself obscures another layer of the image, leaving me as curious about what I cannot see as what I can. ---------------
Galeria Metropolitana Walking through the eclectic Roma Norte neighborhood, it is impossible not to stumble upon one of the area’s countless galleries, such as Galeria Metropolitana, which is showing Maria Jose Lavin’s latest exhibition, “The Fabric of Space.” |
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