Iván Trueta

Saenger Gallery presents the exhibition Cronografías negras by Iván Trueta.

Curator: Michel Blancsubé

Iván Trueta's first individual exhibition at SAENGER Gallery brings together around fifty compositions staged in an original way in the main space of the venue and in its project room.

Most consist of graphite on paper or fabric. They all come from a work started 4 years ago by the artist who is revisiting the 5 homes occupied by his family since their move from Franco's Spain to Mexico during the Second World War. Solitary nails, walls strewn with lost textures and other accidents due to actions already consumed and forgotten will accompany architectural details, facades and interior views, as well as 18 objects that the artist's family took with them while fleeing Europe. Several times synthesized in an accumulation of layers of black dust on flat areas: inalienable historical time, life and its imprint, the work of compiling past moments, now brought together by the shadows they left in a fragmented black spectrum.

Iván Trueta (Mexico City, 1977) he lives and works in Mexico City, is an artist who works mainly with drawing, painting processes and his expanded relationship with space.

His work has reflected on the everydayization and normalization of violence, tragedy and misfortune in the contemporary context, using irony and absurdity as critical devices. In recent years he has addressed the symbolic load and dislocated temporalities of architectural space in the experience of living, as well as the manifestation of historical processes in everyday space. Through drawing and the pictorial process, Trueta investigates this dislocated temporality, this confinement of gestures, traces, vestiges and stelae, stuck in a present that has no other resource than to remove the unspeakable remains of the past. In the words of Virginia Roy: “Trueta's work is presented as a chronography in its literal definition, that is, the graphic description of the multiple aspects of a tempo (...) In his obsession with apprehending it, time remains suspended and questioned in the artist's drawings.”

Iván Trueta's work has been widely exhibited individually and collectively in spaces such as the Carrillo Gil Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of San Carlos, the House of the First Printing Press of America, the Center for Residences and Artistic Research (CRIA) in Ensenada, the Museum of Mexico City, the Anahuacalli Museum, the Museum of Oaxacan Painters, the Museum of the City of Querétaro, FERAL Gallery, La Refaccionaria Gallery, FrontGround Gallery - Manolo Rivero, Libertad Gallery , the Palazzo Cinni in Venice, among others. He has exhibited at international contemporary art fairs in Brazil, Argentina, the United States and Mexico. His work is part of different public and private collections, including the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), the Museum of Modern Art (MAM), the Banco de México Museum, the Casa Redonda Museo Chihuahuense de Arte Contemporáneo, The Luciano Benetton Collection, Venice; the Lumen Collection and the Gruber Jez Foundation, A.C., among others. He has been a scholarship recipient of the Young Creators program in the 2003-2004 and 2009-2010 generations, and a member of the FONCA National System of Art Creators (2014 and 2020 issues).

— Saenger Gallery