Annie Flores

Galería Enrique Guerrero presents Anatomía líquida del deseo by Annie Flores.

In Anatomía líquida del deseo Mexican artist Annie Flores presents a pictorial practice that moves  between suggestion and dissolution, between what the body remembers and what it desires. Through  more than 60 compositions in oil and watercolor —sensual, watery, ambiguous— Flores constructs an  emotional cartography where the brushstroke not only colors the surface but also inhabits it, stains it, and  transforms it into a body.

In these works, paper, fabric, and pigment interact as sensitive surfaces where stains and gestures inscribe  anatomy, fragments of fleeing bodies. Here, the line hints more than it delineates; what is shown is merely  the trace of what once was.

The poetic and symbolic universe Flores proposes combines, on one hand, the erotic and the intimate — traditionally associated with small-scale, cabinet painting formats, delicately placed for close-up  observation— and, on the other, the contemporary image from digital screens, snapshots of pleasure in  this time.

The bodies, mostly female and depicted in scenes of explicit sexual charge, inhabit everyday life within  interiors of bedrooms with beds and pillows—stories that unfold equally tender, sensual, and fantastical.  Juxtaposed with stuffed animals, sweets, and stickers —nods to digital life, which has generationally  accompanied the artist— these images evoke both photos shared from phone cameras and delicate  Japanese shunga illustrations. In this way, a fluid relationship is forged between screen and painting,  between the imagined and the lived, between the ephemeral nature of phone photography and the  durability of oil paint.

However, rather than simply representing pleasure or desire —in an age dominated by screens— the artist  uses them as a method: as a tool to activate and reveal the erotic identity constructed from the body and  its memory. Thus, sexuality is not just a theme here but a way of thinking, remembering, feeling joy, and  painting: each stain is a lingering caress, each shape an insinuation that escapes. In this honest and new  entry into the long tradition of figurative art, Annie Flores’s painting serves both as a constant call to  experience what is inherently human in contrast to the artificial and as an expansion of its narrative  possibilities to explore the act of looking.

–A. G. A.