Eduardo Terrazas

A founding member of the Mexican contemporary art scene, the career of Eduardo Terrazas (1936, Guadalajara, Mexico) has been characterized by fifty years of dedication to the fields of architecture, design, museology, urban planning, and art. Terrazas came to prominence as a young architect when he was selected as the co-designer of the logo and prevalent design elements for the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City. The logo, which was traced in concentric circles, was inspired by Huichol artisan techniques from Jalisco, Durango, and Nayarit, set a precedent for the geometric forms that have come to define the artist’s visual language. In the 1970s, Terrazas began experimenting with the formal relationships of geometric elements through drawings. These investigations, combined with the appropriation of elements from Mexican folk art, have resulted in a unique language that navigates both contemporary art and craft traditions. For Terrazas, the application of craft is an essential ontological process, which he deems particularly poignant for the 21st century. The Huichol yarn technique, in which coloured yarn is arranged on wax-covered boards, has been adopted by Terrazas not only for its aesthetic properties, but also due to its labourious demands, which require absorption in the act, and therefore meditation within the process.

PROYECTOS MONCLOVA

For the first iteration of SOUTH SOUTH, PROYECTOS MONCLOVA is presenting a selection of works by five artists, including: Gabriel de la Mora, Néstor Jiménez, Edgar Orlaineta, Michael Sailstorfer and Anna Virnich. All five artists, while producing widely different work, focus their practice on the idea and physicality of process. The geometric works of Gabriel de la Mora are multifaceted in their subject and materiality. Through his obsessive practice of accumulating and fragmenting pigmented feathers, the artist combines his meticulous craftsmanship with conceptual investigations that result in evocative and abstract configurations. Similarly, Jiménez collects construction materials from houses and projects found in the outskirts of Mexico City as a way of examining the relationship between the processes of destruction, construction, distortion and propagation of Marxist-Leninist thought within social structures in the outskirts of Mexico City. By incorporating the construction materials that are widely used among these low-income areas, the result is a comprehensive pictorial group of work that also absorbs the architectural elements that were essential to these political movements. Edgar Orlaineta’s hand carved wooden wall sculptural works also reveal a knowledge and an intimate contact with the manual process, where what takes precedence over figure and ground is the sensuous matter that transforms intuition into a language. Also working with sculptural wall works is Michael Sailstorfer whose ‘masks’ are sand-cast in aluminum, bronze or iron from quickly drafted cardboard figures in a process that preserves the textures of the humble materials. Lastly, PROYECTOS MONCLOVA presents two tableaus by Anna Virnich. Virnich’s artistic practice focuses on textile-based works, incorporating and layering found fabrics as well as new materials, which the artist stretches on wooden frames thus creating organic and almost painterly compositions that oscillate between transparency and density, foreground and background, agility and standstill. Virnich’s gesture of stretching creates a perceptible tension between the elements: the roughness of a leather-cut-out meets the delicacy of sewn silk.