Artists: Esvin Alarcón Lam, tepeu choc, Diana de Solares, Darío Escobar, Patrick Hamilton.
Overlap/ Traslape
Opens June 1, 2016
The 9.99 Gallery
Guatemala City, Guatemala
Three dialogues are established with three different processes that relate to the idea of overlapping and superimposing elements, time, generations, and actions:
The first dialogue is a interaction in relation to mostly urban landscape in combination with the materials used.
Alejandro Almanza Pereda presents “Horror Vacui (Escena invernal No.1)” [Winter Scene No.1] (2014). From a snowy landscape, Almanza Pereda builds a cement structure that extends beyond the work’s frame to cover the entire wall. The seemingly accidental look of the quasi-action-painting-type dripping acquires a new connotation due to the material and the space extending beyond the painting.
In the same manner, Esvin Alarcón Lam’s “Desplazamiento No.9” [Displacement No.9] (2016) also plays with the space outside the frame. Like a passageway leading to another dimension, the work created out of bus parts establishes an association between the urban landscape and public transportation.
This dialogue ends with tepeu choc’s “Registration No.1” (2016) made out of the plastic material utilized in the informal economy. In it, a series of cut outs call to mind construction tool silhouettes.
The second dialogue is established by the works’s geometric elements such as line, figure, and volume.
Darío Escobar’s “Quetzalcoatl IV” (2004) plays with notions of stability between the undulating bicycle tires, as they surrender their circular shape to gravity laws, and the bronze counterweights.
The piece by Luis Diaz, “The Gukumatz in person” (1971), like Escobar’s work, references the (serpent) deity’s undulating movement: this time in its Quiché appellation, and in a more stable manner derived from flexible wooden sections that adapt to different crawling movements. These sharp forms make a return to verticality in “Chuzo” (2012-2016), a construction-tool-like work by Patrick Hamilton.
In “Sin título” (Untitled) (2015), a drawing by Diana de Solares, assorted color layers generate movement related to air and the kind found in children’s pinwheels. Thus, varying elements of nature come together and overlap in this work.
Finally, the third overlapping dialogue emerges between a spiritual perspective and the physical body. The indigo and turquoise of Sandra Monterroso’s cotton yarn, “Expoliada III” (Despoiled III) (2016) series, colors associated with water, represent the varying tonalities of rainfall through time.
Meanwhile, in Isabel Ruiz’s “Vuelo de las Mariposas” (Flight of Butterflies) (2016 ), the set of opposing crutches reminds us of the body’s fragility: The before-and-after of a transition between what is natural and what the fire has consumed.
In Diego Sagastume’s photographs, we return to the urban landscape of painted walls and open skies whose tonalities show the passage of time, also found in Christian Lord’s “(Mira)anda IV” ((Look)go IV) (2015), a work that through wordplay, invites us to contemplation and to walk, suggested by the circle’s forward movement.