wildpalms
UNTITLED, Miami Beach 2016

In Mexico City, in Colonia la Condesa, few meters away from Parque Chapultepec, the streets are named after los “ninos heroes”. Historical names, projection of shadow of the Chapultepec hill, where 6 teenager cadets decided to jump to their deaths from the castle on the hill after fighting against the U.S troops in 1874. Over the “Agustin Melgar” is located “La Villa”. White chalk color walls. For reaching the main door, you have to cross the patio out of the street, and after the entrance being guided by long foyer, as it is custom in the old houses for the time as La Condesa was the hacienda of Maria de la Campa Countess of San Mateo de Valparaíso.
La Villa is a housing inn. La Villa as a place, is a brotherhood-sisterhood between friends, who are always producing social events within the shared walls. Spontaneously and naturally, in la Villa hapened parties, concerts, dinners, performances, shows, movie projections, and even sport events.
The main core of la Villa, and the artists we are working with are Jose Luís Cortés-Santander, Anibal Catalán, José Elguezabal and Alejandro Almanza Pereda.
La Villa functions as a circle of friends, allowing to share the work of its inhabitants, (those who are living permanently and those who are temporally) in a great number, interdisciplinary artists, as much their relatives o colleagues of other disciplines. La villa doesn’t have any other format more than coexisting, as a principal credo.
Our proposal is to recreate la Villa, creating a pink room environment, which is the trademark of la Villa. Around this, the works of the artists are going to exchange with normal daily life objects (plants, old sofas, paintings, books shelves, etc which remind us the daily life in the house). The pink environment is a collective light sculpture, using simple tungsten light with a pink folio. In this environment, Almanza sculptures will create the initial relationship. Because Almanza uses simply normal objects in his sculpture but detached from their original use, placing those in awkward spatial relationships, creating a visual stress, and discomfort, which is rapidly overcome through the humorous and human irony behind Almanza’s aesthetical system. Catalan’s paintings, created over a visual and an intellectual reconsideration of the uses of space and structure by the suprematist architectural projects, whose existence was the research of the human conditions of life within the modern society, enhance the communication within la Villa by taking the always present chaos in the universe, soothing it, into the interaction of color, space experience, and the human Ur-trieb of creating a place where to be on this word. His paintings reflects the not yet overcome dream of modernity, by actualizing in it, without any melancholy.
Pepe’s work, his collages and drawings, are the third level of the communication between the space of la villa, its displacement in la tabakalera, and the relationship between this activity within the aesthetical discourses. His works remind us, that we are always exchanging with a system of discourses that affects the life of the artist as an individual who has to find an existence. His approach instead to give the spectator a direct reference to this system, expecting of him to be an illustrated beholder, appeals every person who wants to understand the life of the artist. He also, uses the media of the presentation in this way, increasing the proximity between beholder and artist. He made a selection of drawings and materials of him and other La villa members, to display those in briefcases.
The fourth level communication are the videos by Jose Elguezabal. Trained as classical composer, his understanding of images and use of the images differs from the visual artists. His sense of composition is used by editing and chosen topics, using media popular images, almost cultural icons, which are always in the media collective. The momentum of the editing and its sequence are intended to exploit the social references of each image in its own ridiculous and naivete, combined consistently by social expressions of the high culture standards of the bourgeois.