Sebastián Hidalgo

Saenger Galería presents Pueblo de pesca by Sebastián Hidalgo.

“When time goes by, everything real takes on a fictional aspect,” says the narrator of Así empieza lo malo, a novel by Javier Marías published ten years ago. This idea could describe the intention of Mexican artist Sebastián Hidalgo in his most recent exhibition, Pueblo de pesca, in which he constructs a fiction based on his meditations on life today. The central axis of the story is a simple and repetitive, but essential action in the preservation of life: “fish to eat, eat to live; and the same happens with fish”. Faced with this fact, Hidalgo seeks “to start from something simple that serves as a perimeter to generate spaces for reflection, contemplation and reverie, with the aim of interrupting and releasing logic, even if only momentarily”.

Pueblo de pesca takes place in the present tense. It is not the overflow of the past that Marías resorts to in his stories, but the imminent now in which we transit through this critical vehicle. With this tool, Hidalgo also manifests his creative process, based on an automatic and non-rational action, in a “thinking with his hands”, where he confronts logic with a continuous flow of direct perception and creation. He seeks to free the mind from the rational world to give way to a more immediate existence, of sensitive contiguity: “When working I let language develop by itself, allowing images to be a form of thought. The goal is not to understand everything, but to make something happen. It is to set the hook and wait.”

The exhibition consists of a new set of oil paintings and drawings on paper in small and medium format that are accompanied by a mural painting and a chromatic intervention in the exhibition space that delves into a pictorial language that hybridizes the representational and the non-objective. With this, Hidalgo explores both the thresholds of the supports, “the beauty of abstraction”, and the periphery of vision, the “peeking through the windows, outward or inward”. The work thus creates a membrane between two worlds, the terrestrial and the underwater, and also between painting and drawing, which become sketch paintings. Pueblo de pesca also functions as a vital force capable of catalyzing the saturation of our channels of perception in everyday life to recover spaces of rest, as if they were mandalas of protection or a pair of special shoes to immerse oneself in the uninterrupted reality of the present and still float on the edge of it.

–Christian Barragán