PEANA is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of artist José Eduardo Barajas at the gallery. Titled Saliva, the exhibition features sixteen new paintings and a site-specific mural accompanied by a sound piece created in collaboration with Xpan. The concept for the sound piece originated from the study of light in space and the monitoring of applications to predict the weather.
In this new body of work, José Eduardo Barajas showcases moments derived from various exercises involving memory and imagery, drawing from memories, cell phone photographs, stock images, AI, and a certain time of the day. He translates these into snapshots on canvas, practicing his role as a painter while simultaneously creating a poetics that oscillates between painterly accidents and the quest for imagery. In his words:
“They are about the light in the summer, the flooding of the studio, the shadows of trees at 3 pm, the blinding sun that hinders work, trips to Cuemanco, my cats' paws, nature images from Google search, very diluted paintings, particle simulators from Blender, humid atmospheres, landscapes painted by my grandmother, the sound of a branch hitting my window every night, and above all, about drool.”
The result is a collection of images that might be dismissed or seemingly lack any particular value; they capture fleeting moments, brief instances difficult to quantify, memories and recollections. Barajas offers us a synesthetic experience that uses sight as the point of entry, allowing us to simultaneously smell, hear, and feel as we view. These images arrive as we're about to fall asleep or in a daydream, coinciding with the onset of drooling – moments of safe places in a world we sense is ending. The reconstruction of reality is pivotal to Barajas' work, whether virtual or tangible; the origin isn't crucial. In his essay "The Dawn of Endcore," Shumon Basar coins the term that gives its English title: Endcore. This term seems to encapsulate a complex blend of cultural, historical, and philosophical shifts marking a new phase in human experience stemming from climate change and technology that shape our reality. This reality is characterized by uncertainty, rapid change, and a challenge to previously held assumptions about the course of history.
Taking the premise of Endcore, the different pieces comprising Saliva could be seen as a multiverse in which various realities coexist, providing a platform to imagine diverse outcomes and possibilities. This offers an escape from the overwhelming complexities of the present through exercises in memory, imagination, and an aesthetic defined by this new understanding of reality. "We recreate the horizons we have abolished, the structures that have collapsed. And we do so in terms of the old patterns, adapting them to our new worlds." Barajas creates his patterns, his realities, from these "new worlds," reconstructing them through different layers of fiction to give rise to a new narrative.
The titles of each painting provide a narrative for each piece that shapes this multiverse, reality, present, or however one might label it, offering a glimpse into these fleeting moments. The piece titled Picacho Ajusco emerges from the artist's memory of going to school as a child by car. More aqueous paintings like Reflejo Twisted, Piedra Muralla, or Baba originate from the comparison between the artist's studio flooding after heavy rain and the liquid particle simulators used by 3D software. There's a poetics that emerges from the everyday and how we remember it. Fixating on these imperceptible instants transforms the paintings into almost meditative acts.
Special thanks to: Ramiro González-Luna, Xpan, Pau and Pamy Rangel, Berenice Buendía