Demián Flores Cortés, the Juchiteco artist who has managed to position his language in the art world, with which he surprises at each exhibition, overtakes M2 who works on a series of unusual works. He has decided to give another life to his palettes, those supports on which painters rely to create the colors and tones with which they give life to their creations.
Even though he is an artist who works with graphic arts, screen printing and other media, this time he resorted to a tool that throughout history has been fundamental to painting.
The series, which you have called Decrease, will be made up of 30 works, each of which represents and synthesizes several of his creative processes, through which he has given life to various exhibitions for almost a decade.
The artist (Juchitán, Oaxaca, 1971) says that for about eight or ten years he has been creating these pieces with palettes. “This work is interesting because all the palettes are different, there are some very loaded in which I used oil, others, depending on the series, account for when I painted tempera, for example. Some more are almost transparent ”.
A different plane
Flores Cortés’ interest is to turn these palettes into a kind of recovery of the memory of his artistic production, with which he gave life, nuances and textures to his works of the past.
“As I am always trying to innovate and reinvent myself, I recovered my palettes in order to place them on a different plane and give them an aesthetic shape.”
The creator, whose work belongs to private collections and to museum collections such as the British Museum in the United Kingdom, explains that he uses the word waste for this series, alluding to the waste that remains when a job is done in graphics. Normally, that excess paper that is thrown away is called waste.
“It is that sense that I am working on has to do with that: when I paint I always use my palettes to mix colors, and I have not thrown them away. I kept them for years, so I decided to give these ‘wastes’, which account for those processes, an aesthetic meaning and make works of art with them ”.
Behind each palette there is a story, says Flores Cortés. “I remember how I used each of them, guided by the textures and the colors. I’m very interested in reinventing myself, so I always experiment with new colors, like the ones I present in my most recent exhibition at Casa Lamm. There have been other series that go from one place to another, and that is where I realize what era those palettes and the techniques ”.
The artist maintains that now with the new ways of seeing art, wrapped in reflections and concepts, what he is doing is opening the gap so that painting as a proposal also has its own load of meaning and its own conceptual value.
Recognize the roots
Demián Flores Cortés has exhibited collectively and individually in renowned museums and galleries in Mexico and around the world, both in Havana, Cuba, and in Lisbon, Portugal; Toulouse, France, and Milan, Italy.
Currently, Casa Lamm in Mexico City shows Banners, canvases for memory, which brings together 25 works made recently, and that can be seen during this month.
In these works, the artist pays tribute to his roots, to Zapotec popular painting and to its creators, for which it is a tribute to popular art, to that which is learned by trade, with an enormous ritual and religious load.
In his words, this series is a reflection on the identity, memory and roots of this tradition, as if it were a door to show those cultural practices that are now overlooked.
Last year he participated in the group exhibition Being everything is part, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, in Los Angeles, California. The artist says that “it is a museum that is on Hollywood Boulevard. They invited us to do a project and the idea was to make the pieces in situ, but with the pandemic the exhibition was reformulated and the work had to be placed on sideboards with large windows ”.
The artist exceeds your zip code
In Decrease is the heart of “this artist without adjectives”, who “builds his opus personal as a vehicle to understand its environment, a space that far exceeds its postal code … “, as defined by Felipe Ehrenberg when he invited him to exhibit in Brazil and wrote the text” AND IN THIS CORNERAAAA … A pentagram of thoughts around the figure from juchiteco ”.
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