Solitaria cae la noche sobre nosotros, solitarios amanecen los días brillantes

Lateral presents Solitaria cae la noche sobre nosotros, solitarios amanecen los días brillantes, a collective exhibition featuring works by Daniela Bojórquez Vértiz, Ilán Rabchinskey*, Aglae Cortés, and Andrea Martínez.

This exhibition brings together a selection of works produced by four Mexican photographers during their residency at the ONOMA AIR program in Fiskars, Finland. What is it about the austere landscape of southern Finland that attracts four artists from such a distant and contrasting latitude? Beyond the particular visual investigations that interest each artist, an answer can be found in the natural and geographical context of Fiskars through four perspectives manifested in the way they approach the territory of light, time, and silence. From this point of view, the landscape is understood more as a concept than as a photographic genre and thus becomes an abstract concept, an imaginary entity from which each one operates.

Although they come from different artistic fields, the four belong to the same generation. They agree on approaching the photographic medium as a catalyst for broader artistic approaches and on their experience in the North as a complement to the research each has carried out throughout their careers. It has been their intention to break away from certain canons of the photographic medium in order to create points of rupture in the discourses, forms, and aesthetic concerns of the Mexican photographic tradition.

Whether through in situ interventions based on minimal and almost immaterial gestures that reflect a primary landscape altered by humans, as in Ilán Rabchinskey's series; or by establishing, as Aglae Cortés does, a dialogue between the immeasurable condition of the landscape and the idea of origin as a problem of representation; by addressing the space-time relationship between the landscape and its viewer from both visual and textual abstraction in the work of Andrea Martínez; or the work based on photographic concepts and the picture within the picture by Daniela Bojórquez Vértiz.

Three residencies took place during the winter (Andrea in 2015, Aglae in 2017, and Ilán in 2018) and one during the summer (Daniela in 2019). The artists recently met in Mexico City, their place of origin, to share their work and discuss their experiences during their stay in Fiskars. It was during these conversations that they identified new relationships between their respective works, shared interests, and the possibility of dialogue between their works. It is these dialogues that shape this exhibition.

–Lateral

* Ilán Rabchinskey is presented in collaboration with Patricia Conde Galería