Jorge Rosano Gamboa

The volcanoes precede and will outlast us; they are presences we share with other ages of the Earth and with those who once inhabited it. The landscape of the Valley of Mexico and its surroundings—framed by the Iztaccíhuatl and the Popocatépetl—serves as the conceptual and emotional starting point for Ahí donde quiebra el camino.

In this exhibition, Jorge Rosano Gamboa deepens his exploration of image and matter, stemming from his interest in photographic thought as a way of thinking with the image and operating visually through the logic of light, time, trace, revelation, and memory—without being confined to the photographic medium.

His paintings engage with the Mexican landscape tradition from an atmospheric dimension. In them, color functions as a relational phenomenon: applied directly onto the canvas without blending, it maps a sensitive geography that evokes the fleeting qualities of fumaroles, clouds, rain, and wind. Influenced by pre-Hispanic visual language, Rosano Gamboa designs compositions that weave together abstraction and forms of nature, establishing a balance between what appears and what vibrates beneath the surface.

The body of work presented here reveals a profound connection between his artistic practice and craft—a relationship that has accompanied him since childhood and now manifests in an experimental approach to techniques and materials, resulting in a series of sculptures, papel picado works, and tapestries. From this exploration emerges a personal vocabulary that activates a shift from the visible to the perceptible, and from symbol to presence.

There is, on one hand, the distant landscape of mountains and ever-present volcanoes; and on the other, the roadside landscape—the path that tells stories, that swiftly recedes from our field of vision, leaving behind traces of scenes we often barely recognize. This liminal space, between distance and motion, between the focused and the fleeting gaze, is the territory Jorge Rosano Gamboa’s works inhabit and evoke: a place where looking becomes a ritual gesture, a way of holding the landscape.

— Paola Santos Coy