Jorge Rosano
Mexico City, 1984
Jorge Rosano Gamboa's work comes from photographic thought, in recent years his work has sought new ways of reflecting on the relationship between the moment and its representation: the ritual of creating an image, its register, its methods and above all, the moment trapped in picture form. His work creates manufactured and intervened spaces where absence becomes visible, since they are made up of images that seem suspended because they are only a trace, trail or memory. As if throwing himself into the strangeness of the ghostly, his work is nothing more than a spectrum where the spectacle of absence is contemplated, where the image and the ghosts are one and the same.
He graduated from La Esmeralda (2011), completed a postgraduate degree at SOMA. Among his solo exhibitions are Impermanencia, MUCA Roma, Ciudad de México (2013), Ominus, 1919 Gallery, Berlin (2016), Pentimento, Galería Breve, Ciudad de México (2017), LANDLORDS, Filet Space, London (2018), U, Casa Equis, CDMX (2020). His group exhibitions include Nuestro Barrio, Neurotitan Gallery, Berlin, Dark Cartographies, Efraín López Gallery, Chicago (2016) and Blessed, Chalton Gallery, London (2016). Abrigo de Roca, laNao (2021). He has participated in fairs in Mexico, Korea and Lima. He has been part of the selection of the Photography Biennial on two occasions (2016 and 2018) and has participated in several residencies such as Casa Wabi (2019) and Neurotitan in Berlin (2016).
CV
Jorge Rosano Gamboa presents his first individual exhibition at the LaNao gallery, thus closing his stay in the artistic studios that are a central part of the gallery project. In the En Medio, arises from the crossroads of various paths, both production, collaboration and dialogue. It comes from a long investigation that starts from the reflection of time, memory and remembrance or what one thinks one remembers, but comes as an artifice from visual representation and the survival of forms. This project transits between the experimentation of organic materials and the collaboration with popular artists from Michoacán, Morelos and the State of Mexico, at the same time, it was a laboratory of curatorial accompaniment, trips and conversations about what it is to be in the middle ground between the artistic creation and curatorship alongside Paola J. Jasso.
Through sculptural, pictorial, photographic (daguerreotype) and sound installation work, Rosano explores the relationships between the material and the immaterial, and pauses briefly right there, in the encounter that is drawn from that intersection.
This exhibition is about a non-place and the idea of a production that is not found as a fixed genre, but is in constant tension between various layers and categories, a constant movement between: contemporary art, popular art, the ritual, the divine and the profane. It does not seek to find clear dichotomies, but, above all, to find the multiple paths that exist between two points, the great variety of spaces in which you can situate yourself to look at something, to create or co-create something, to give it meaning.
On the one hand, we find references to some of the towns of post-revolution Mexico, his own interpretation of an almost-Rulfian geography, environment, characters and settings, mixed with his memories growing up in Tepoztlán, on the other, the notion of the route within the landscape itself, the transit, the threshold, remains open.
The use of the mask and its formal reverberation activate the game of mirrors throughout the entire exhibition. The mask has served throughout history to find oneself through the eyes of the other. With this, the artist investigates his own artistic language, but also reflects on the death of his father, whose ashes are part of one of the works in the exhibition. There is an operation to re-update the matter, give it body and make it tactile in order to go through the abstraction of memory and thus see it again, from another side, from here, in El en Medio.
"U" - horizonte
Mono-cyanotype on Cotton
150 x 150 cm
2021
"U" - horizonte, 2021
Mono-cianotipo algodón
150 x 150 cm
The "U" is a letter, last vowel and a particular type of voice sound. Phonetically it is located in the posterior area of the palate and is quite discreet. For the purposes of this project, it lends itself as a graphic gesture that makes the ubiquity of the fold and its purpose visually legible in the conceptual body of Jorge Rosano's work. More than a fact, an event. Cyanotypes (a procedure that makes it possible to generate negative copies due to the photosensitivity of certain chemical compounds) is an excuse to reflect on the ritual, haptic, and material capacity of photographic action. It is an opportunity to review the work of Jorge Rosano in recent years, who has used this simple and systematic process, but with which he has obtained magical and categorically poetic results at a time of accelerated visual production. By chance, he holds in his hands the fold that allows the unveiling of multidimensional topographies that commemorate a specific moment and place in time.
An event horizon is an imaginary contour that marks the point of no return in a black hole. In other words, all tangible or intangible information that enters is “lost”, however, more recent studies maintain that the information is stored and codified in these. On the other hand, the Einstein-Rosen bridge or wormhole raises the theoretical possibility of a geometric body in which information is transferred entirely from point A to point B, in a shortcut through the universe. A fold in space-time would make it possible to move both within our universe and to a parallel one on a relative time basis.
This is as pertinent as it is anecdotal -and furtive- in the 30 blueprint exercises that have been produced in a symbolic and irreplaceable time frame; a single day, some July 15, 2020, in memoriam of the tenth anniversary of the death of Jorge's father.
So, in the same way that the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli rhetorically refers to the fact that the universe is not made of rocks, but of kisses - and assigns an event condition to our own existence -, the action of folding the cloth is translated like that manual and somewhat liturgical possibility of transforming an -intangible- event into a -tangible- object and vice versa from the point of view of the visual result. A commemorative moment, revealed from intimacy, labeled and revealed, creates a fiction that negotiates memory and desire. The dimension of the theatrical in Rosano's work is equivalent to what is revealed, whether it is hidden or manifested, or the very surprise of its meaning. As the individual understanding we have of the universe.
The plasticity with which the tempering of the fabrics on the frame is approached -being this a support that declares an inherent traditionality- allows the images to challenge their center of gravity and also maintain their light natural corrugation that harmonizes and melts into the photo-graphics superimposed on them. A game of perception that is surely accentuated in the virtual sphere. From the conversations that started this collaboration, it was important to recognize the role and responsibility of hosting on a virtual platform, an exhibition space, and therefore an existing body of work. If it exists, how should it exist? It was key to rethink the scope of the virtual tour experience, as a distribution platform ad hoc to the project. "U" only exists and behaves only under the temporality of this interface. A digital-space-time event.
Bajo la noche
Digital double exposure
2017.
Landlord
Cyanotype on amate paper
100 x 100 cm
2018
LANDLORDS is the third part of the project carried out in San Pablito Pahuatlán, located in the Sierra de Puebla. The purpose of this piece was to transfer a delimited space, previously worked by a shaman and a craftsman, to another space, in this case the Filet Gallery in London.
31 amate papers measuring 1m x 1m were made with the help of Don Genaro, a craftsman recognized for his impeccable work with the paper. With this, the space of the Filet Gallery in London, which measures 31 square meters, was drawn in the house of Don Enrique, one of the shamans of the town.
On this space Don Enrique performed a ceremony, where for a few hours he negotiates with the spirits of the mountain, the protection and care of this transferable space.
During the ceremony, "The Lord of the Mount", "Mother of Earth", "Lord of the Corn", "President of Hell" and several others are offered music, food, incense and two black hens and a red rooster as a sacrifice. . All the offerings and the same spirits represented in cut-out papers are wrapped in a package on a "death table" and thrown from the ravine next to the holy field, because it is important that there is no trace of everything "touched".
The papers that were used as the floor of the space to be protected were, prior to the ceremony, soaked with blueprint, which made them photosensitive.
The time of the ceremony, which was approximately 3 hours, is the time the chemical was exposed to light, so the traces that remain on the surface of the paper are more like traces of what happened. Traces of dogs that passed over, blood from chickens, brandy, wax and especially the trace of the rain that appeared at various times during the ceremony is visible.
The name of the pieces is thought in English, LANDLORDS, due to the relationship that this word has between the way in which the Otomi refer to the lords of the land and the way we have with those who legally own the spaces.
Each piece is one square meter, because this is how we divide the space. The pieces are autonomous and each one comes with a sound file of the ceremony and its music.
This piece has been shown in its entirety at Filet, London and partially at Salón Acme and a couple of group exhibitions. Besides being now part of several collections.
