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2007
drawing:installation
wall drawing, mixed media on paper, 8 drawings, framed
76 x 56 cm each
Nina Menocal Gallery, Mexico City, MX
Nina Menocal Gallery is located in the Roma neighborhood, one of Mexico City’s gallery districts, in a house in the “French style” built in the early 20th century. Passing the security door, the visitor enters a spacious marble-faced atrium. The high wall that separates the courtyard from the adjacent lot is adorned with a lozenge-patterned ivy trellis. A perron with an ornamental metal banister leads to the exhibition rooms, which are located on the mezzanine. A former salon that used to have street-facing windows, the exhibition room has now been transformed into a tall White Cube whose only opening is a large double wing door at the center of one of its long walls that leads to the courtyard.
The walls were painted blue in broad, open brushstrokes up to just below the transition to the stucco ceiling. Visually opened in this manner, the room is closed in all directions like a cage by drawings of nine panels of wire mesh attached to steel pipe frames. One such fence element takes up each of the wall sections to the left and right of the double wing door; two, each of the short walls; and three, the wall facing the door. Diagonal reinforcements in each panel form a zigzag line. The fence elements, whose upper edges are aligned with that of a fixed wood panel above the double wing door, end ca. 50 cm (20 in) below the edge of the coat of blue paint. A margin of 20 cm (8 in) remains between the lower edge of the fence elements and the floor. Mounted at regular intervals on top of the fences, which have been realized in pencil and ink directly on the wall, are eight works on paper (100 by 70 cm / 39 by 28 in) in white frames that reprise the underlying blue color and the motif of the fence. The picture as a window—thus the illusion—opens onto the painted wall on which it is mounted. What it shows ideally is determined by the real site it occupies. Besides the blue with which the walls are painted and black and white, gold paint is used both in the structures supporting the fences and in the works on paper.