A Buffet of Hearts on a Platter

Terremoto talks with Daniela Elbahara, Kora Moya, Ricardo Gonzales and Daniela Villarreal about love and the virtual, dreamlike and affective imaginary spaces that accompany the program of the Daniela Elbahara Gallery this year. This program, through painting, seeks to bring into play love codes, intimate stories, uncertainties of desire, heteronormative constructions and the contemporary vertigo that accompanies the human experience.

Terremoto: How is your program planned this year? What are the approaches and questions that artists and their works go through?

Daniela Elbahara: This year, we start with Todas Partes [Everywhere], the third individual exhibition by Ricardo Gonzalez ––Mexican painter based in NY––, in which he addresses self-love and self-acceptance; or, as he sees it, the shadows or dark entities that live within oneself that must be accepted and embraced. In May, we put up the exhibition by Spanish artist Kora Moya titled Ofrenda [Offering], in which the landscapes are altars dedicated to various flowers endemic to Mexico. Using compositions similar to those of the altars of Catholic churches, or home niches, Moya Rojo pays tribute to the architect Luis Barragan, to the surrealist painter Remedios Varo, and to the tensions between love and heartbreak through sensual and feminine figures.

After this visual “spring”, in summer there will be the first individual exhibition by the artist who graduated from Esmeralda, Javier Jaimes, who, with his organic figures and strange plants with intertwined black hands and strokes similar to those of cartoons, confronts us with a dark but resilient world like the weeds that sprout from the asphalt. For autumn, precisely in September, the young painter from Monterrey, Ines Barcena, debuts in the gallery with dark paintings that address the concerns derived from romantic love, family and social class. To conclude the year, we will have a collective of Monterrey artists curated by Daniela Villarreal and Daniela Elbahara, based on a book of aphrodisiac recipes, addressing the topic of love spells and the popularity of these practices among new generations.

So the artists find themselves exploring, from different perspectives, universal concerns about love, the complex relationships and bonds that we establish with the other, but from a very contemporary vision, sometimes bleak, other times more challenging and others questioning paradigms of love that are losing more and more meaning each time. Ricardo Gonzalez thinks about self-love despite the shadows; Kora Moya, about the love of nature and Mexico; Javier Jaimes, on the other hand, reflects on the love of shadows and resilience; while Ines Barcenas delves into the idea of romantic love and the Catholic church. Daniela Villarreal explores self-love and her sense of belonging and authenticity as a woman while the collective that we are preparing takes us to a much more mystical part of love, thinking about bewitchments, spells and desire.

So the artists find themselves exploring, from different perspectives, universal concerns about love, the complex relationships and bonds that we establish with the other, but from a very contemporary vision, sometimes bleak, other times more challenging and others questioning paradigms of love that are losing more and more meaning each time

T: What would the pictorial have to contribute with regard to human relationships and contemporary love? If we think that we are in the twenty-seventh resurrection of painting, and also addressing an ancient theme, what intersecting narratives and resonances do the artists you represent make? Where do they express their concerns from?

DE: The times dictate the concerns of society. The artists I work with explore their inner worlds and the way they relate to others. The choice to show them in that order was random, until I realized that the common thread was love. It was not on purpose; we are at the end of the cycle, and we need to revalue love, its imaginary and symbolic spaces.

Kora Moya Rojo: I believe that contemporary love is at a point of rediscovery. It adapts to current dynamics that are full of stimuli, novelty, overdose of options and overexposure. A free buffet of hearts on a platter. It’s adapting, dying, or learning to flow. It is launching yourself into the unknown, without knowing what you are going to find; but it has roots and foundations that make it impossible not to give in to it. Love, like painting, has always been there. In my case, I would compare it to a surrealist journey, or to an automatic text like the ones Andre Breton wrote. It’s all impulse, internal instinct, letting yourself go until you wrap yourself in such a way that you create your own attractive reality. Nothing makes sense, but at the same time, you feel that it is impossible not to cling to it, as if it were an irresistible incoherence. Imagination paints scenarios that reason does not understand, illusions with no origin that converge on an unreal plane. It is bringing out the soul.

Daniela Villarreal: Self-love, in this postmodern world, for me, is about unifying and understanding that love starts with oneself. Accepting the sense of belonging and authenticity from the position of a contemporary woman who questions deep-rooted social and cultural norms.

Ricardo Gonzalez: The pictorial has a lot to contribute to human relationships. From the pictorial, you can express deep and abstract emotions that written language cannot express. In painting, colors, shapes, strokes, scale, composition, intention and material, all these elements have the power to connect with our nervous system to move us emotionally, as long as we are open to it. Painting is there to communicate with the world. To define even a little bit what it feels like to be alive. What it feels like to be someone in the world, with all its joy and sadness, with the complexities that are created by the contrasts and dualities in which we exist. My painting is categorically expressionist and I would like it to work within these topics and for the viewer to be able to emotionally resonate with it. Love is also a deep feeling, full of dualities, intense instincts and beyond reason.

T: Can you discuss some examples where works transform, produce, question love narratives? Are there current trends or critical approaches that reevaluate the representation of love, sexuality, and being with each other in painting?

KMY: In nature, I find the seed of everything. Reality, in the end, is the fruit of this and imitates it as if it were a mirror. In nature, there are organic figures that remind us of structures or shapes that allude to the human body. The fluidity of the shapes, the roundness, the fleshiness, the velvetiness… These are characteristics present in the pictorial imagination and are translated through the use of imagined visual elements. These shapes converge and intertwine with each other, as if they were two lovers, merging until they finally become a hybrid entity that has its own identity. Although organic shapes, in this case flowers and fruits, do not have the intention of showing sensuality a priori, there is a characteristic in them that screams eroticism. In the book Cuerpos en Bandeja, the Cuban poet Orlando Gonzalez-Esteva talks about fruits and eroticism in Cuba, with the help of the Cuban painter Ramon Alejandro, who illustrates said literary work. With this book being a reference in my latest body of work, love and sexuality continue to be a theme that is found in the depths of my paintings. I feel that, once you delve into them, this theme makes sense and emerges to the surface, becoming a prominent feature that changes the perception of shapes. With flowers and fruits, I want to celebrate the naturalness and sensuality of the shapes, as if it were a visual poem.

DV: My work often presents female bodies in non-idealized forms. It questions beauty stereotypes and sexual roles, showing real bodies with imperfections, scars, marks and the complexity and beauty of the female experience. It also addresses the issue of feminizing monuments, cities and decontextualizing the gender perspective that has been given to them.

For example, I have a detailed photograph of a naked woman that seeks to confront the viewer with the reality of the female body, rejecting objectification and celebrating authenticity. In my work, Las tres gracias [The Three Graces], I challenge heteronormative constructions to make non-normative identities and relationships visible: an intimate vision of lives and identities. I also address other topics, such as issues of power, consent, gender violence and social justice, using fruits as a means to communicate messages, prompting the viewer to question power structures and reflect on critical contemporary issues that fall on women.

RG: In my work, we can identify the love narrative from a darker perspective. A group of characters/shadows are together, in a group, looking towards the viewer smiling, almost as if begging to be accepted, to be loved. It’s like accepting our demons, loving the shadow as well as the light, because they are two sides of the same coin. One defines the other. It could be a “love” seen from its dark contrast.

You could say that there is a feeling of sexuality within expressionism, where there is an unraveling, a wild and primitive feeling guided by instinct, a transfer of energy, primordial energy, and a lot of space for vulnerability.