Manuel Mathar

Proyectos Monclova presents Desde el silencio parlante (From the speaking silence) by artist Manuel Mathar.

These paintings by Manuel Mathar (Merida, Yucatan, 1973) demand to be viewed for longer than an instant. In principle, they feature images drawn from the pictorial traditions of portraiture and still life, through notable examples of work with color, light, and shadow. Nevertheless, this figurative, realist imaginary that he lays out before us as a point of departure starts to get strange: as the gestures depicted therein reveal an unsettling illegibility, the scenes abandon their familiarity and suggest unexpected situations.

Having begun his painting practice in the late 1990s, the artist has explored different problems inherent to the medium, notably the work of lighting and of reflecting on visual sources. This series, like previous ones, features figures and elements from his immediate surroundings, such as relatives, friends, and colleagues, whose relationships to the objects that accompany them are not very obvious.

In an earlier project, Memorias de un futuro, un país en otro país (Memoirs of a Future, One Country in Another Country), the artist took on the task of working on 72 pieces based on the principles in the sociologist and psychologist Eva Heller’s book, Psychology of Color. In it, Heller presents 135 color plates that describe different sentiments and emotions. This reasoned use of color enabled the artist to explore an emotional link to the city of Merida, Yucatan, where he was born, and where he has lived and worked for a few years now. Starting off from Heller’s research, he reflected on light, but also on belonging to a territory and the processes of introspection, as well as on personal memories and the way in which they are constituted to be productive of images.

In the body of work on view at Proyectos Monclova, Heller’s way of thinking about creating atmospheres of color—from more personal sets of themes—and the relationship to territory are still present. After several months of working in Spain, where Mathar had acquired a set of lightly pastel-colored oil paints, he returned to Merida and used his new paints to explore the light there. Because there are no hills or mountains in that peninsular city, as he observes, there comes a time in the afternoon when there is a sort of cinematic sensation, a feeling of a certain artificiality, as if the city were a film set. Starting off from this idea, and from a city where pastel colors characterize the streets, he has thought about making his paintings the way filmmakers do with their color palette.

In the same sense, he also conceives of the pictorial resource of portraiture as being staged. As in the cinema, sit-coms, or theater, there are a couple of sets—for example, the artist’s domestic space—that constitute the atmosphere for different storylines. Nevertheless, Mathar’s work is closer to sensations and atmospheres than to narratives. The stories are there as potentials; they are provocations for the viewer’s imagination. As in dreams, the sensation is more powerful than the specific memory.

This cinematic perspective is helpful in thinking about another important element of these works: namely, photography, a source that fuels them. At one point, his paintings took photographic prints as their point of departure; now they come from photographs on digital screens. That said, the work focuses not on reflecting on the medium of painting based on analogue or digital images, but rather on the way in which these tools have been incorporated, in their capacity as spaces of thinking of color that feed the pictorial process.

As the artist has explained:

Painting pays attention to light and how it gets handled. Colors are a spectrum of the possibilities for understanding it. That’s a technical idea, because nature provides colors. In photography, that’s very regulated: you can use filters and there are technical things that allow you to modify them. That’s where I realize that photography isn’t really how I support my work; it’s just a tool, like a thick or thin paintbrush, or a brand of oil paints. One understands that the better one uses one’s tools, the better results one can achieve, but the principle is always painting. Photographs are my sketches.

Mathar’s painting draws on film and photography, then, but also on the notion of improvisation, which comes from his experience making experimental music with the collective Los Lichis, which he formed in 1997 with José Luis Rojas and Gerardo Monsiváis. As a result, he offers compositions in which something that seems natural reveals itself to be strange, like chicken’s feet in a glass of milk. Dogs change scale and adopt impossible postures; the gestures of the subjects depicted become illegible. The paintings are made with photographs and incorporated elements that come from an archive of other images. With these quasi-film sets, the artist appeals to the interpretation and construction of more complex narratives, for which the viewer is always responsible. The elements become symbols; the characters are reading something that is on the verge of making them change; they point a finger at the viewers who gaze upon them, interpellating them.

The sensation of strangeness is in dialogue with experiences like the one Mathar has had while living in Merida, where he learned the word “insile,” a term that does not appear in any dictionary, but that functions as an antonym to “exile,” a way of going somewhere without leaving one’s physical location, or of staying in place without really being there. It is confinement and banishment in one. As the artist has observed:

Exile has political connotations; insile doesn’t. Borders can be internal republics, which would be emotional states; thoughts and behaviors, too. These periods of exploration can generate personal maps, a process of introspection and observation. In that sense, it can be a silence that speaks, it could be used to build images, a bird’s-eye view.

That sensation can be equated to what painting does: it seems to be silent, fixed, able to be read in a single glance, but reveals itself as a territory to be searched, in which different times, sources, and narratives appear as potentials. It is out of that silence that speaks, out of those personal and introspective maps, that Manuel Mathar offers these works.

–Christian Gómez