In his works, Diego Zelaya seeks to capture a piece of night, of darkness

Diego Zelaya’s painting is about edges and borders. But, above all, about dichotomies. In it, he says, there is room for: Figuration and abstraction, light and darkness, life and death, the new and the old, the real world and the imaginary.

It is a proposal that gives no respite to the observer, supported by a permanent tension between opposites: My work is about contrasts between things, but painting offers a space where everything can coexist in some way, albeit with certain sacrifices. It’s something that really catches my attention..

In The abyss that devoured the sun, In his first solo exhibition, which will remain open until October 10 at the Galería de Arte Mexicano (Gobernador Rafael Rebollar 43, San Miguel Chapultepec), the artist, born in the country’s capital in 1990, reflects all of the above through 22 paintings and two ceramic pieces from his most recent series, created last year.

This new pictorial production by Diego Zelaya has a double origin. On the one hand, the reading of Our share of the night, In which the Argentine Mariana Enríquez talks about an element that comes from night time, which he sought to capture through painting when trying to capture a piece of the night, a fragment of darkness.

The other starting point of this series is the painter’s research into mystical traditions, mainly from Latin America, in books and films.

I really like all that fantasy world that I grew up reading; for example, Lovecraft, all that is set in an environment that was not mine. Investigating what has been done in Chile and Argentina, but especially in Mexico, was very inspiring for me to make a proposal for a fictional world that felt slightly mystical, but also that did not appeal to a narrative.he adds in an interview.

I take elements from Latin American traditions based on the desire to visually appropriate that entire fantastic world in order to give it a new meaning.

The young artist’s imagination in this exhibition is made up of beings with blurred faces, without eyes, inert, as if they were asleep or dead; spectral or dreamlike characters; diffuse and evanescent hands; withered flowers or those in the process of withering. It is part of the author’s dichotomy between the figurative and abstract universes.

I have been made to realize that nowadays there are few artists who present something figurative, and I think it is great to be able to include something of that here, of representative things; but, at the same time, I really like abstract painting.he explains.

So, taking the figure to the edge of abstraction is very interesting to me. That’s what my painting is about, an attempt to mix those two languages, but in that process you have to sacrifice things, on both sides, and what I’m looking for is to achieve a balance in that tension, as well as to cause a bit of mystery, of doubt about what all this is.

Most of the works in the exhibition have one thing in common: they are, in appearance, monochromatic, with a predominance of talo green: “The color in this series refers to a nighttime schedule. It is a color that comes from sleepless nights, from insomnia, from being awake at 3 or 4 in the morning and observing.

I found it very interesting how at night or in the early morning objects appear in a brownish tone; but one color that I always noticed was a slight greenish and a very dark purple; the possibility that painting offers me is to make them more extreme.

Another common aspect in the pieces is that most of them have at least one dark spot in the shape of a circle, like the one formed when a photographic print is burned by a chemical product. This is, as already mentioned, a deliberate element with which the painter wants to make this piece of night, of darkness that emerges from his works.

Although many of the paintings are based on the world of cinema, and several may even seem cinematic or come from graphic novels, given the variety of their formats, Diego Zelaya reiterates that his desire is far from creating a linear narrative and what he seeks is for each one to be a fragment of an independent story.

The pieces of The abyss that devoured the sun They are part of this artist’s return, five years ago, to easel painting, a career he studied in the United Kingdom, in Wales, and after having ventured into muralism for around a decade.

He says that he began making murals at the age of 18, when he began his art studies in that European nation, motivated by the tradition of the great Mexican muralists of the 20th century, but also by the social idea that came from our country of bringing art to people’s daily lives.

He has works of this type in Mexico, Cuba, the United States, Germany, Portugal, France and the United Kingdom. A few days ago, after three years away from this field, he returned to do a mural in the Iztapalapa municipality.