EXHIBITIONS
Lucía Vidales “To cool the blue”
Dates: Aug 1 – 22, 2020 [Summer Holidays: Aug 13 – 17]
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film
The gallery will implement necessary measures to prevent coronavirus infections.
Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Japan of Mexican artist, Lucía Vidales. “To cool the blue” features eight paintings from 2018 to 2020.
Vidales’ works come from a personal imagination of painting, its history and its particular repertoire of operations. Among these operations we will recognize the signs of living and dead beings, as well the possibility possessed by perceived limbs and organs to withstand immediate transformation into a range of painterly phenomena, such as directions, colors and accumulations. Her interest in the complicity of matter and humor makes it possible to fuse tragedy with the uncertain joy brought about by the survival of frail and new life: a world of our beloved passed and living community. In her paintings, pigment is a bodily residue, where one can see the visible marks and accumulative movements in which her practice has traced time. Vidales blurs the dogmatic boundaries between painting and picture that Abstract Expressionism had disjointed and recovers it through the weight of plasticity creating an image without much drama.
This painting wanders as a friendly ectoplasm would; as a deadly multi-morphing fume capable of joining the past with the future. Its ghosts are the ghosts of a personal history of painting, segments of a disappeared, invisible or still pending imagination fiercely narrated in the first person. A refusal of plenitude and unity that brings to mind the strangely nocturnal and subterranean writing that Clarice Lispector employed to say something that I would have loved to say to you right now, which is that everything is heavy with dreams when I paint a cave or write to you about one; that out of it comes the clatter of dozens of unfettered horses to trample the shadows with dry hooves, and that without any alternative, here we are, the cave and I, in the time that will rot us.
Christian Camacho
‘The time that will rot us’, exhibition text, Edison 137, Mexico City, November 2018
Lucía Vidales’ oeuvre is inseparable from the concept of time. For the imagination navigating her artistic practice in the making of paintings, graphics, and sculptures merges fiction and history, where the artist unfolds stories across generations from a first-person narrative. In Vidales’ canvas, the multiple layers of paint display a range of densities and transparencies, which seemingly take on an organic life under the artist’s dynamic brushwork. Its capability in transformations when interacting with light and space further enhances the works’ expressiveness. As a signifier, the rich colors applied in Vidales’ paintings testify to the timely process of human labor in painting, as an attempt to bring inner world enrichment and consolation for wounds of the past and the present.
Vidales’ works are also, included in the “¡Viva México!” show at SHOP Taka Ishii Gallery.
【Concurrent exhibition】
“¡Viva México!”
Dates: Jul 24 – Sep 27, 2020 [Summer Holidays: Aug 9 – 17]
Location: SHOP Taka Ishii Gallery
Born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1986, Vidales currently lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico as a BA professor at the University of Monterrey. She received her BA from ‘La Esmeralda’ National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking of the National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico in 2009 and MFA from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Faculty of Art and Design, UNAM in 2014. Vidales recently presented solo exhibitions at the House of Deslave in Tijuana, Galería de Arte Mexicano (GAM) and Galeria Alterna in Mexico City (2019). Recent group exhibitions include “Murales para un cubo blanco” at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City (2020); “Prince.sse.s des villes”, at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); “100 Sculptures” at Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City and Paris (2019); “Naturally” at Lulu, Mexico City (2018), “Tiger Poems and Songs for Hurricanes” at Galería Travesía 4, Guadalajara (2018), “Montar la Bestia” at USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Museo Nacional de Ferrocarril Mexicanos, Puebla, CaSa, Oaxaca (2017).
