During this year, the exhibition called “Uayé Mix” was mounted at the City Museum in an exercise to make visible a certain pictorial production marked by a liminal condition and that entails a fresh twist in the current creative context. The production of each of those that make up the exhibition obeys their particular processes; Their coincidences rather lie in a stance towards the problem of art and its daily practice. The room text that accompanied the exhibition is attached below.

The group of artists that make up this exhibition is characterized by the constant exercise of pictorial action and the acceptance of the trade as a way of life. This has become a body of work that shows vitality and obstinacy, which implies a commitment to art not only as a form of livelihood but as an object around which daily existence is organized. This vitality is evident in the intense color, in the gestures of the line, in the spontaneous and organic textures, and in the themes that embrace the ordinary with ease.

Adrián Bastarrechea, Irvim Victoria, Juan Pueblo and Carlos Pliego take on painting boldly and, in a way, under their own rules even if that means boosting the risks of the local art market, which itself barely subsists. Against the grain, the production of the four has gained ground on the local scene and, little by little, the production of each of them has matured and acquired more value.

It is possible to see in the work of the four a nod to the theme of identity. The name of the exhibition itself, derived from something they call “Uayé” and which means “from here”, demonstrates their concerns about the contents that define their identities in a global scenario that already shows visible nationalist setbacks, a context in which Artists vigorously reaffirm local aspects without attempting to stop dialogue with the external.

   It can also be observed in their production spaces, in the rooms of their houses that they have transmuted into their own workshops, the vitality of the creative exercise. His house-workshops are montages that show the life of the full-time painter. For this reason, in this curatorial exercise, they have been invited to appropriate the museum rooms for a time as a space for creation, in an attempt to give the rooms that energy that surrounds the canvases in process in their own workshops.

As part of the collective work of these painters are the collaborations that sometimes occur between two or more authors. Taking turns, one after the other, they build a joint image in a rhizomatic process in which worlds intermingle, giving way to hybrid and unsuspected images.

Carlos Pliego is an artist abandoned to art who finds himself seduced by the act of facing the white surface. The canvas has no rules and he feels comfortable spreading the paint wildly, brushing the brush over the canvas with each stroke, giving the impression of just being himself when he paints. He has developed a pictorial language that favors impasto, textured surfaces and loose but fast and effective lines. His figuration, uncertain, is completed by the eye but along the way the painting is activated with the brutal power of the material richness of the oil painting. His figuration gains expressiveness and suggestion.

The constant individual and group portraiture, something that we can find in his production exercises in a row, refers to the painter's life itself, they are testimonies of assuming pictorial practice as the axis of daily work.

Juan Pueblo, for his part, has decided to be a painter and artist, in exchange he has dedicated his days to the craft, to drawing, to oil painting, to the unconscious construction of a statement about the regional identity that seeks to be present in every display of his personality. .

In his latest works, his work in front of the painting has given complete results; a harmonized palette with sharp color accents, plastic richness in the lines and more daring and successful compositions. Juan Pueblo refers to local popular culture more directly than the others, his production entails a constant interest in what represents the endemic, perhaps his stay in northern Europe for several years has generated a keen keen eye, committed to what defines about us.

Irvim Victoria is a young artist who has widely explored the plastic capacities of paint, its transparency, its opacity, its lightness, its solidification times, its saturation. He has made painting his daily exercise for some years now.

His earliest large-format paintings, of organic worlds achieved from abstraction and the result of experimental paint spreading techniques, already showed a budding painter who understood the place of painting in the local contemporary art scene. After developing his project selected for the FONCA, his painting took on a more suggestive meaning, a language between the abstract and the figurative, always enriched by the volumes of his fillings, his drippings and his handling of textures. Victoria uses organized ways of proposing conceptual projects, which has allowed his painting to be read clearly and have more ambitious scope.

Adrián Bastarrechea produces in various media and with different techniques with the same ease and effectiveness. Engraving, drawing, digital graphics, oil painting have been areas that he has successfully navigated.

Within his developed work, the configuration of a plastic language already characteristic of him, identifiable, stands out, in which the plot, shading and stylization of organic bodies compose disturbing textures and forms. When this imprint is evident in faces and bodies, his images take on a dramatic and critical meaning. Perhaps without looking for it he has created a world of organic forms that come to life and suggest other unusual, extravagant, foreign and even inappropriate ways of human behavior.

The sweep over the faces, the deconfiguration of the human body, the distortion must be understood as the revelation of a hidden reality only clarified through deformation.

Photo credits: City Museum of Mérida City Council 2019