Germán Venegas

Proyectos Monclova presents the exhibition Empty and Full by Germán Venegas, curated by Patrick Charpenel.

The exhibition delves into a segment of the artist's paintings and sculptures, taking as its starting point the spirituality that the artist extends to his creative practices. This is primarily achieved through the conscious and meditated use of tools, materials, and their application on various surfaces. The exhibit features pieces created using different techniques and media, including works with ink on rice paper, charcoal drawings, pastels on paper, oils and acrylics on canvas, as well as sculptures and wooden reliefs.

For over two decades, Venegas's work has traversed a wide array of themes, with a notable focus on his spiritual contemplation within Zen Buddhism. The artist extends his spiritual pursuit to his artistic practice by conscientiously crafting his works. Each wood carving and painting involves a conscientious approach in pigment application and wood manipulation.

The exhibition also presents works that reflect Venegas's interest in pre-Hispanic mythology, particularly Mexican cosmogony. Reliefs and sculptures from the "Tlalocan" series are showcased, centered around the representation of Tláloc and featuring figures from the Mexica imagination: tlaloques and pyramids. In these pieces, Venegas harnesses the natural forms of wood, making carving his most recognized technique.

From the "Miscelánea" series, paintings made with charcoal and pastel are displayed, depicting the main motif of death and the superimposition of anthropomorphic figures, as well as figures strongly influenced by pre-Hispanic art.

Germán Venegas (La Magdalena Tlatlauquitepec, Puebla, 1959) is a Mexican painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker. He is recognized as one of the representatives of the artist generation that emerged with significant force in the 1980s on the national cultural scene, often labeled as neomexicanists. His work stands out for its expressionism translated into medium and large- format carvings, the infusion of color in his visual art, and the formal exploration in his charcoal and ink drawings, a mode of questioning his own tradition (as an artist culturally and technically rooted in Mexico). His work is infused with elements and references to Mexican culture while also incorporating influences from Zen Buddhism.

He graduated from the National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Engraving at the National Institute of Fine Arts. He received the acquisition prize at the III Youth Art Encounter in 1983. He has been a member of the National System of Art Creators five times: 2001, 2004, 2010, 2014, and 2020. He also received support from the Cultural Projects and Coinvestments Program in 2000. His work has been exhibited in Mexico and abroad (United States, Japan, Spain, Guatemala, Brazil, Germany, Ecuador, Australia, Cuba, Italy, France, China, England, the Netherlands) and is included in the collections of the Museo de Ponce in Puerto Rico, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo in Badajoz, Spain, as well as the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Arts, CCS, Bard, N.Y. Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, among others.

— Proyectos Monclova

The Zen Tradition is a school of Buddhism that emphasizes a set of fundamental precepts: zazen (sitting meditation), a deep understanding of the mind, and applying this understanding to everyday life. The spiritual perspective of Zen is not focused on simple intellectual knowledge of the world, for it aims at a higher level of consciousness, thus emphasizing a direct understanding of our reality, or prajñā. Here one focuses the entirety of one’s attention on the authentic nature of the mind, and the meditator should always strive to be mindful of present phenomena in their entirety rather than focus on individual objects (thereby enabling the mind to avoid getting bogged down with interference, conceptualizations, or grasping at objectives). This explains why this meditative tradition does not regard knowledge as simply accumulating information or describing phenomena. In contrast to the classic European tradition of building scientific knowledge out of a rational, logical inferential structure, Zen enlightenment involves experiencing things as they naturally appear.

The Puebla-based artist Germán Venegas (b. 1959) works from a standpoint grounded in this lineage of Buddhist spirituality and, in a complementary way, extends this inner search into the way he pursues his creative practices: through the meditative application of pigments on different surfaces, or the calculated sculpting of wood blocks. At first glance, Buddhism and contemporary art might seem to be at odds with each other, practices that cannot be mixed together or combined in a complementary way. But in the world of this one-of-a-kind producer, they seem to come together naturally.

In his painting, sculpture, and drawing practices, Venegas seeks a deep and mindful understanding of the empirical knowledge of nature, as well as the importance of material media as vehicles of knowledge and individual expression. Thus, in Buddhist meditation the artist seeks a sort of detached consciousness, while his art strives to uncover visual purity and a sort of contemplative emptiness. Both paths are part of his life and work, and it is here that Buddhism and contemporary art come together and reinforce each other.

Painting, sculpture, and drawing, as we know, are means of expression. But, beyond the formal structure that makes it possible to pour feelings into materials, it is the creator’s consciousness that gives a work its form and defines its meaning. Mind and matter therefore constitute the two fundamental elements of creation in Venegas’s work.

This exhibition presents the vision of someone whose disciplined routines, time spent in meditation, and artistic creations make manifest a space of fullness and emptiness, as a consequence of which these works are the expression of a never-ending quest and a complex process of personal discovery. Through sculptures and paintings of furry monkeys, along with drawings of inebriated men, mythical gods, meditating buddhas and naked bodies, a fractured space unfolds in a kind of a multi-layered plane on which the duality of our nature is thrown into relief. In this exhibition, here, now, we perceive the complementarity of fullness and emptiness.

— Patrick Charpenel