Alfredo Gallegos Mena

With the exhibition Estar na corda bamba | Error inestable, Alfredo Gallegos Mena (Mexico City, 1991) continues his predilection for Brazilian culture, particularly for the language that the speakers use on a daily basis and that is intimately in contact with Samba music and the philosophy of life that it communicates through its songs and that has a strong impact on the social and cultural sphere, as well as for the pictorial and poetic aspects of the concrete-constructivist movement in Brazil. Evidence of this deep interest is the artist's choice of diverse expressions from the subgenre Samba de Roda and everyday orality to name his works and projects, as is the case with the current exhibition, which has been titled with the phrase Estar na corda bamba, which is used to indicate an unstable situation that requires an arduous and complex control; probably, a proverb could express it as “He who risks over the abyss has conquered the fall”.

At the same time, in this exhibition that brings together for the first time a new and ample body of work from five series identified by a particular material: wax, clay, lime, matchboxes and metal oxide, the artist invokes a second title in Spanish, Error inestable, to indicate that his practice surpasses the action of translation and, instead, opts for a way of working that resorts to approximation and acceptance as integral strategies of his creative process. This is how the artist puts it: “Each of the series included in this exhibition I have started them out of the need to experiment with different materials and their sensitive potential, not knowing beforehand the result I will achieve, although contemplating the possibility that during the process chance and error may arise, which are welcome and give a crucial character to the work”.

Establishing a correlation with the Brazilian concrete movement, Alfredo Gallegos Mena wonders about the pedagogy and practice of art, of painting: “What makes a painting a painting: its materiality, the techniques used, the history that precedes it and that self-reaffirms in each act?”. Faced with this questioning, the artist recognizes that his exercise is motivated by a constant restlessness around praxis, the critical act that makes possible that art that falls in the domain of the concrete, the everyday and domestic, including the great or small adversities that the simple and common circumstances of contemporary life entails: “It happens that in the series of wax paintings the temperature changes inside the materials or in the environment, the drying times, the application of irregular shapes within geometric bodies, the skill or failure of my hand and the tool I use, guide the development of the work. And the same happens with the series of matches and clay, in which the wear of the paper, the imprecision of the cut, the fragmentation of graphic and chromatic information, the resistance of the mask that causes disparity between the cubes or the uneven adherence of the smoke on the surface are expressed with determination. All these errors are the singularity that intrigues me to discover at every moment”. From this peculiar philosophy of human things, Alfredo Gallegos Mena extracts a system of creative work consisting of continuous phases of search, discovery, transformation and learning that go from “beginning to end and end to beginning.”

–Christian Barragán