I used to paint only in black and white when I created art in Mexico City, but watercolor has always been a medium I've used to create figurative art. It felt natural to take this road to expand my artworks into an international market 10 years ago. In a few brush strokes of watercolor, an image can be transformed into something fascinating for its visual qualities and properties. I practice everyday in my studio to evolve my work, to explore new ways of doing art, to find the hidden strokes in reality’s narrative. Graphite and watercolor are the vehicle of expression that has allowed me to narrate the internal process of my thoughts, into a festive and anecdotal way.
I began to explore this technique after seeing the watercolors of Dalí's Divine Comedy series during one of my stays in Barcelona. The thing that amazed me of this deep exploratory series was the vastness of it’s color, narrative and composition. Those neutral colors left a deep impact in me. The thing about watercolor is that it fades away as the years go by, so this paint felt not the right thing to create art in the final years of a long journey of violence in Mexico.
Monotyping, on the other hand, is a medium closer to pictorial art, in which the drawing over the plate takes on certain qualities of the litograph, where you can work with smudges, lines and tones immediately and in a language visually coded through the application of pressure on the inside of the paper using the etching press. Using the black and white in strong and dramatic way to represent an image.
I began this series in January 2018. At the time I was thinking of selling the workshop, as the months following the 2017 earthquake were difficult and made the place seemingly unsustainable. I began this series with a block of leftover paper and stored ink. During my first experiments I realized this was a medium with a largely untapped potential, due to its focus in more formal graphic languages and its rather orthodox multiple printing techniques. It was a good divergence, and with the first sales of the series I was able to save the workshop.
I'm presenting this series of monotypes (we are going to present 100 of the 90 x 60 cm works as a big drawing installation in the MUSEO CUATRO CAMINOS this March 2019) as one more anecdote in my career as a visual artist. It's the result of several months of exploration. The violent political regime left a savage scar on me in this last year. These past two years have been very difficult, and together with the earthquake they drove a lot of artists to seclude ourselves in our studios while still having to work.
Paper as a format is and will always be the cheapest method of expression there is. Just ink and a white, acid-free or plain paper surface are enough to represent a whole universe with a very low budget. After the earthquake, sales dropped because it was simply not the time to invest in art. There was a different set of priorities, such as rebuilding the country and donating whatever was in our pockets in order to cover the massive costs this disaster left in its wake. The following months were a sobering experience. Regardless of everything our workshops had to continue to exist and grow, we still had to pay rent and utilities, and the price of coffee, avocados and art supplies kept rising.
Mexico City is a complicated territory to explore. In all its corners there's an unleashed beauty and it's difficult to focus on just one thing, or portray it without falling into clichés or an easy anecdote. I consider my time in this place a very cerebral phase of a continuing spiritual transformation. I've lived in downtown for five years now, having spent 2014, the first of them, in a room at the Isabel Hotel just a few blocks from the Zócalo, where I subsequently rented an old office in República de Uruguay Street in which I drew and painted for a year. This place would eventually become my print workshop.
Over these past four years my comings and goings have won me some human credentials to draw and talk about this place, to establish a personal narrative latched on to the giant that is this city and the people. Everything that transpires here is a universe of wonders, to me.
It's not surprising that the world at large has its eyes placed on this city, a few weeks ago I was visited by my good friend Jay Howell (Sanjay and Craig), who told me about his amazement with it, and how its energy reminded him of that of San Francisco back in the 90's, a key place for grafitti and hip hop culture, as well as the music and aesthetics of the first 10 years of the 2000's. We've heard the same from plenty of people who lived in NY during the 80's. So 40 years later, Mexico being an art mecca make sense. In downtown between Revillagigedo and Luis Moya street you can see painters come and go, canvases in hand, wandering at night looking for materials among the rubble, each of them in their own experimental journey which will serve as cornerstone for the new age coming with the change of the country administration in 2018.
It's been a long ride, especially for us creators who find ourselves outside of institutions as much as the private sectors, which have been overrun by the "mirreynato" (young rich people) in all aspects of the art world. This has been an out-of-control situation for years now, and having talent is considered a liability in spaces where images are displayed. Instead, a more design-based, mass-appealing kind of art was pursued non-stop, one that favored a shallow exploration instead of skill and deeper searches, which posed a threat to the narrative imposed by the galleries, more interested in trite and immediate gestures. Any argument against it was repressed by having these spaces denied, and thus marginalizing many images produced over the past few years. The current status quo is supported by the capital of this "mirreynato", which generated a safe-punk aesthetic possessed of a harmless discourse, more concerned with generating fashion trends and shape the rebellion of the upper middle class, which has tried to impose its aesthetic in the city. There is now a unifying discourse which defines this “rebellion”, and it's a rebellion sponsored by brands and the rich, through which capital has infected every aspect of art, although even if artwork has become a marketable object by excelence, it also continues to be an object of intangible value, which always escapes every form of measurement.
The fight within artist workshops to generate a future, however, is something that is always working beneath the surface. Drawings again show us the way, because you can't expand an idea without rehearsing it first through paper. The plans of a reality in construction are in the paper surfaces which every morning are placed at the tables of the artists who live in this volcanic rock-covered city.
—Rene Almanza, México City, Estudio del Balderas, Januaryr 15, 2019
