Néstor Gutiérrez and Bernardo Montoya

This work features a ‘reclining’ painting, and on the floor, on a rug, a small plastic bear that incarnates the presence of the spectator. In Asunción (Assumption), the painting is disemboweled against the wall along which the pigment drains, and in Menta (Mint), the painting on cardboard is distributed over a labyrinthine spatial setting, with small abstract paintings on zinc sheets placed against the door frames and randomly titled Pingüino (Penguin), Gallina (Hen), Avestruz y Compañía (Ostrich and Company), and an aluminum staircase giving the viewer access to these. In the installation Robinson Crusoe, a vinyl jar containing a shaft with a small red cloth tied to its end, traces of pigments, lids, and other residual elements are disseminated like wreckage vestiges of the act of painting on newsprint.

Through his Campamento M (Camp M), Montoya proposes another commentary on painting. On the one hand, he presents wood and glass boxes with vestiges of paintings, incorporated lighting, wires and switches, titled Pinturas Luz (Light Paintings). In another piece, an art-object, Pintura-Pintura (Painting-Painting), he features something resembling rocks made of paint. The materials are recovered leftovers from a furniture paint factory, and they function as sorts of manipulated fossils placed in the exhibition space by the artist with the aim of highlighting their pictorial status, showing the process of building layer upon layer of paint. In the installation specifically titled El campamento (The camp), the artist brings into the gallery plants sown in precarious tin flower pots, his work table, a sort of athanor-table with a small light bulb on top of a drinking glass filled with wastes from the studio, surrounded by plants that grow wild on the studio floor. The installation functions as an object that the light/bulb reveals to be the presence of a perennial event, an act that is presented bare before our eyes, without any mysteries, illuminated.