Artist: tepeu choc
Color Mapping
April 6, 2016 – April 30, 2016
Alianza Francesa Guatemala
Guatemala
By abstracting physical space and transforming it into graphic representations, this is how the art of making maps operates, allowing us to conquer inhospitable territories and to access areas through which we move. In a similar manner the artist tepeu choc (Guatemala, 1983) manages to greatly synthesize the external lines and to render them concrete in the most basic aspects of artistic creation: form and color. He creates new languages for reading these lines transforming them in a occupied area. His titles inform us what he is expressing. From figurative representations that he captures in basic color, following the encapsulation of specific times and their abstractions, to the three-dimensional gain and the reading x-ray style of his sculptures, his work invites us to tour those places, that having become strangers. we are able to re-visit from a new appropriation perspective. Color becomes the basic element for the distinction between lines dividing objects, spaces, and temporality—areas where the artist moves. With only seven basic colors, Tepeu Choc is capable of recreating abstract ideas of distance, or the difference between night and day. Color also becomes referential in his sculptural work in the form of floating threads around the interior and exterior space, without specific distinction. While in his two-dimensional creations he applies the golden mean rule, which allows them to be accessible and pleasing to the eye, in his sculpture he retains a somewhat chaotic element due to the plasticity of the materials with which he works, especially in this exhibition. Thus, the artist’s so-called conquest comes from his real-world knowledge and from the rules of abstraction, which first appear close to an exercise in geometry but in reality is a recomposition of the physical spaces he invites us to get to know.