Mateo López

The result is an art which is incessantly “adrift” as stated in the title of his artist’s book : an art that dares to take risks in order to seek the obverse and the reverse of limits and possibilities of his “laboratory of forms”, forms which are often split into two. Each piece is an exploration conceived as an open and “exposed” work: the artist is aware of the double meaning of the word, implying both displayed for viewing and vulnerable to the gaze.

His works often function as traces of an unceasing exploration, sometimes as residues of that which has been glimpsed, or as proofs of the exploration in progress and they are, in a way, fragments that contain the whole; nascent logbooks of an oevre that is as much a meta art as it is a personal diary.

In fact, in his particular relationship with objects there is an awareness that things narrate stories, and at the same time, there is the pleasure of contemplating (scopophilia) the passage from the imagined to the constructed which drawing allows.

The experience during his childhood of frequent relocations in which things were rearranged in the new spaces and seemed to take on new shapes is linked to his exploring the transformation of objects. He recreates and repositions them on paper or in his installations as signs of anecdotes, and as a vital trace. His is an art reflection of his own strategies and of the inhabited world. It is an oeuvre without final forms. Without a definitive place in which to be installed. And in that work, his smile is a key factor. The open nature of his works connects them to randomness, which he in turn incorporates by iconographically narrating each exploratory encounter as a way of indicating that the real work is beyond this. Invited by KBK Gallery to present a solo show in the Federal District, Mateo López went from calculating the number of inhabitants in one of the most densely populated cities in the planet to calculating the number of pairs of shoes, and this served as inspiration for the simulated situation of a shoemaker traveling to Mexico City to work there. This fiction, connected of course to the legendary empty shoe box exhibited by Gabriel Orozco in Venice and to Francis Alÿs’s walks in the urban chaos, was the matrix of his exhibition. He transformed the shoe box into the shoemaker’s room which contained a world of paper objects: from the work tools to the manufactured shoes. A specular space in which the leading character was the dual version of the artist, and the pieces were duplications that contained Mateo López’s smile. In ArtBo 2009, he literally “transformed” the space of a gallery stand into a fair. The place habitually hidden from the public hosted “the work” with the instructions take a glove and turn it inside out” while the traces of the mounting (a fictitious lace box, among other objects) were displayed. The in situ installation contained a caustic mockery of fairs.

López’s skepticism regarding the art object allows him to exhibit a lightness which is neither cynical nor devoid of hope, and which is reminiscent of Calvino’s proposals. In his simulations, in his plays with inside and outside, right or wrong side, or in his way of combining the external space and the mental space, there is a permanent invitation for the spectator to delve into the intimate as something inseparable from the “seams” between art and reality. At Casas Riegner Gallery in Bogotá, López installed a replica of his workshop which included not only its tables, work materials and drawings in progress, but also his own presence with the aim of mounting the exhibition before the eyes of the public during the month assigned to this end. Instead of transforming the family home into the artwork, like Kurt Schwitters did with his Merzbau, López altered the gallery space, transforming it into a mirror- workshop in which he transgressed the solitary atmosphere of creation and thus revealed it.

Besides the derivation from Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, which consisted not in reproducing the whole work and making it portable but in rendering the whole studio trans-portable, there was an element of “performance” in the action. It was not only a work within a work, but it also included the physical presence of the artist, exposed to a mental rather than a physical limit.

On the day of the opening, the only work on display was the drawing represented on the invitation card, framed and exhibited in an exhibition hall.And a space intervened with an artificial wall hosted the artist at work. The spectators went through empty exhibition halls, and when they took a look inside that room, they did not know whether it was a part of the gallery offices. “Curious people found drawings, objects, and when they discovered that they were fictitious, the whole space became relative,” evokes Mateo, for whom the key lies not only in connecting the viewer with the anecdotes that each drawing contains and in showing him/her the processes of art, but also in abandoning the sacred notion of the framed, fitted, protected art object.”

Paper rulers and cardboard scissors do not only play with the copy of a model; they also play with the awareness of fleetingness. Besides, they refer the viewer to the unnoticed rituals of intimacy present in the relationship with objects. They even reflect a mode of nostalgia that is distilled in the smile. While it is true that they resemble the gesture through which Edward Hopper reproduced the paintings he had sold, it is also true that they involve a certain avowed skepticism regarding the art object in relation to the market. Mateo López’s drifts incluye his work Diario de Motocicleta, a two- month journey through four Colombian cities he embarked on riding the motorcycle he has used since he was fifteen. He incorporated it in the exhibition space together with fragments of the iconographic “diary” of the trip the objects he compiled, the documentary photographs, the drawings made along the way which he exhibited at an artists’ meeting in Medellín and at Jenny Vilà Arte Contemporáneo Gallery in Cali.The portable/transportable studio now became the suitcase containing his notebooks, and he used museum or exhibition spaces as temporary parking lots for his motorcycle. The traveling exhibit culminated at Casas Riegner Gallery, featuring a very long horizontal table on which objects such as a basket or a rock weighing eight kilograms constituted both the map of a very personal journey and a sort of topography of the visited areas. That work was the antecedent of his explorations of Colombia’s railways, once great works of engineering, which had been non-operative for decades. The abandoned stations, frozen in time, became metaphorical spaces representing a process of modernization which has fallen into oblivion. Mateo López used the CIFO 2008 scholarship to begin to develop a stage of Viaje sin movimiento (Motionless trip). He toured the Western Railway line compiling information, conducting interviews, taking pictures, even making models of the stations. Other fragmentary explorations, such as those exhibited at the Jumex group show, The Traveling Show, have become a way of rescuing memory in which the documentary graphic and oral is incorporated in the fictitious objects and deposits in little things the duplication of an object, the notes about a walk, the fragment of a heard melody the possibility of conjuring the deterioration of time, the wind that sweeps away traces, the great stories. One is moved by the unexpected power of the logbook, endlessly under construction, of an artist adrift in his approach to the paradoxes of contemporary time in Latin America.

Profile:

Mateo López (Bogotá, 1978) Mateo López holds a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Los Andes (Bogotá), where he developed curatorial projects such as Cuadernos Azules. Among his solo shows, mention may be made of Deriva, MUSAC, Spain (2009), Topografía Anecdótica, Casas Riegner Gallery, Bogotá (2008); and Diario de Motocicleta, Museum of Modern Art, Medellín (MDE 07), Medellín, Colombia (2007). He has participated in international group shows such as “The Travelling Show”, Júmex Collection (2010); 31o Panorama da Arte Brasileira, Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo (2009), Moby Dick, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, USA (2009); 2nd San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2009; Viajes, at the Cervantes Institute, Madrid (2008); 9th Cuenca International Biennial, Cuenca, Ecuador, 2007, and Urgente: 41st National Artists’ Salon,Cali,Colombia(2008).

Selected as artist-in-residence at Gasworks, United Kingdom, he developed a project based on his book, Deriva, featuring a self- reflective vision of materials associated to drawing and editorial production. The resulting exhibition, presented at the Camberwell College of Arts and at Gasworks, reflects his method of exploration, analogous to a log book recording drifts in a nocturnal sea. He included drawing instruments designed on the basis of his own body dimensions, ensembles of found objects an old frame in which a paper branch grows and the surprising emergence of “a hidden geometry” in the negative space of the residues of the colored paper cutouts used to create works. The playfulness of an artist who does not cease to explore, through his art, the possibilities that may be encountered in the journey through the looking-glass.