Artists: Laura Barrón, Ximena Berecochea, Laura Cohen, Alfredo De Stéfano,
Pía Elizondo, Eric Jervaise, Patricia Lagarde, Gerardo Montiel Klint, Fernando Varela.
April 19–May 31, 2012
Patricia Conde Galería
Lafontaine 73, Polanco
Mexico City 11560
info@patriciacondegaleria.com
The contemporary Mexican landscape definitely became another during the mid-nineties. A genre that, with such a long tradition in the photographic culture, would never be the same from the innovative practice of a generation that emerged in Mexico in the second half of the decade. A profound change that renewed the natural areas on the environment, either since the symbolic or a new strategy toward spatiality, or since the thoughtful modification of the visible. With these new creative interactions, a new landscape eventually was conceived.
It was a fact that the old forms of the practice of landscape seemed exhausted by then. And not many contemporary artists seem to mind affecting them, because, really, who was still interested in the recurrent urban spaces or in the persistent rurality so visited for decades? And what was evident was that the inquiries of the body, objects and staging outweighed the very old genre of landscape. But that generation of the mid-nineties knew there was a whole new territory to explore (literally). They sensed it otherwise. And that began to be detected since the Seventh National Photography Biennial held in 1995. In a subtle way, but there appeared the series Chronicles of Steel, an icy industrial universe of the young artist Laura Barrón. And that was something symptomatic.
The gist was that the landscape began to look like a renewed genre. Especially from the personal, an action that was completely new. Because the landscape, say the social one, headed profoundly towards an individual action in the sense that the relevant was not to exhibit the city and its people, or the rural and its untamed vastness, that is, the external, but the deeply intimate: the creators’ vision—and obsessions—dumped towards the space now editable in the image—literally—of its creator.
This was a new attitude. And it may not necessarily speak of a particular generation (there were artists who entered the genre, having emerged in the eighties, with those who just emerged in the nineties), but it certainly does of simultaneous practices. Everyone was forging its own landscape and once all those creators gathered it was visible that a renewal was happening. Especially since the deeply personal. That made the difference. The social environment in the years of the mid-nineties, had become an absolute chaos (political assassinations, the error of December, the emergence of the EZLN, the economic crisis as always) so perhaps the views towards the external were rejected to take other paths, towards the individual. More towards the own. A new and unique history from contemporary photography that already was generating new insights.
This is a recent history. The story of how a group of artists paid attention to a genre that was believed exhausted. And how they revitalized it in the best way, individually, yes, but also responding to a time that requested it.
—José Antonio Rodríguez
Curator
