By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS
Muted pastel colors, oversized floral arrangements that seem to project themselves off the canvas and an interweaving of human and animal sensuality define Mexican artist Gonzalo García’s latest collection, now on display at the Cam Gallery in Mexico City’s Colonia Polanco.
The exhibit, which opened on Thursday, Feb. 2, is García’s 10th private showing and is titled “Flesh.”
It is the creative result of García’s four-year exploration into Mexico’s golden age of film (from 1930s to the late 1960s), led by director Arturo Ripstein, and García’s own passionate obsession with livestock and human metamorphosis.
In addition to huge soft oil paintings of horses transformed into centaurs, with human heads and limbs and sleek equestrian bodies, the collection includes a number of black-and-white sketches and several giant canvases of simulated wallpaper in faded shades of pink and purple that look like they were torn from the background surface, all continuing with Flesh’s secondary theme of natural flowers.
“Ripstein was very focused on the décor of his sets, and each room had a specific style of wallpaper, which helped to convey the overall mood of his films,” García told Pulse News Mexico, pointing to one of the three-dimensional wallpaper paintings.
García, 37 and a native of Puebla, who has previously presented exhibits in Switzerland and the United States, as well as Mexico, said that his love of horses and other barn animals, such as goats, was inspired by his grandmother, who owned a farm in Veracruz.
“I think that too often the horse is presented in art as a forceful masculine image,” he said. “In my work, I try to present the horse’s more feminine and delicate side.”
In virtually all of the 20 pieces in García’s Flesh collection, horses are portrayed as female centaurs, half mare, half woman.
“I have tried to present images that can be disconcerting in a comfortable and serene setting, thus inviting my audience to delve into my creations in an inviting and non-jolting manner.”
García’s Flesh exhibit will remain on display at the Cam Gallery through Sunday, April 2.
The Cam Gallery is located at Aristóteles 354 in Mexico City’s Colonia Polanco.