Mauricio Villarreal’s work is populated by ethereal beings that escape any intention of restraining them. Their bodies—sometimes discernible, and other times barely hinted at—are made up of the same element as memories and dreams. It is a translucent blanket that can be passed through and touched, but not trapped, like a wisp of smoke or the steam left after a hot shower. These characters are self-portraits in different times and perspectives of the artist’s life, as they originate from experiences and the exploration of the subconscious. Additionally, the characters represent archetypes of social conditions, human behaviors, and common fears.

For Villarreal, art has the potential for emotional healing. The painting functions as a threshold of access to a spiritual reality that manifests itself in the memory, desires and mood of both the creator and the viewer who finds a bond of empathy in the work.

He studied architecture at TEC for two years, then he began to paint.

He enrolled in architecture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and transferred to a bachelor’s degree in arts at UDEM. In addition to his practice, Villarreal paints, does analog photography, perfumery, ceramics, sculptural pieces and clothing.

He has participated in four group exhibitions in Monterrey, one of them in 2016 at the Centenario Museum, in 2017 at the Metropolitan Museum and in the Marcelo Galán studio space and in the group exhibition “Casa Erosionada” at the Anahuacalli Museum by Diego Rivera Agosto – October 2023. Has participated in Salón Cosa MTY. And he has had three individual exhibitions; Espacio sin nombre, Monterrey in 2020, another in CHUCH.

Ricardo González utilizes a limited palette, simplified mark-making, and sense of humor to explore the language of expressionistic painting and drawing. His work draws on his own automatic drawings, urban wall scribbles that populate his environment in Mexico City and New York, and celebrates a recurrence of Art Brut via the likes of Jean Dubuffet, Karel Appel, and A.R. Penck. His fast manic drawing suggests an intuitive child-like doodle. Fragmented figures with grimaces and smirks frequent Gonzalez’s work invoking a character all too familiar that is deep rooted in our collective unconscious, a sort of savage full of uninhibited energy that could easily be found in early rock n’ roll or the tales of early outlaw blues songs. The paintings ricochet between the sublime and the nihilistic, creating a tacit dialogue between satirical cartoon and evocative painterly gesture. Gonzalez elevates seemingly cursory doodles into signifiers of pure form, medium, and process, thus propelling them into the language of art.
(Text by Asya Geisberg Gallery)

Ricardo González was born in Mexico City and lives and works in New York. He received an MFA from New York University, and his BFA at New England School of Art & Design, Boston, MA and Madrid, Spain. He has exhibited in numerous venues in New York, NY, Boston, MA, Miami, FL, Berlin, Mexico, and Belgium.

• UNTITLED. Miami, Galeria Talcual, Mexico City
• Traneudstillingen, Copenhagen, Denmark
• Galeria W, Santiago, Chile

• Martin Wong Scholarship Award in Painting

• The Wall Street Journal
• Time Out New York
• Art F City
• Pas un Autre

Hugo Robledo produces paintings and site specific artworks. While he mainly focuses on two-dimensional works, he has experimented with sculpture and installation. Architecture, the built environment and man-made objects have long been the artist’s fascination. His most recent series explores visual representation of modernist architecture in Mexico and Latin America. A critical review of the formal attributes of late rationalist avantgarde movements motivate his latest works. The series of paintings refer to modernist architectural spaces and their representation. The oeuvre open up several questions about the abstract nature of architectural space, the qualities of surface and matter offered by the pictorial support and painting as an object or as representation. This body of work aims to create a connection between pictorial formalism and the ideological models that shaped the current sociopolitical reality.

He studied Visual Arts at the Faculty of Arts and Design of the UNAM. In 2012 he made an academic stay at the Institute of Arts of the State University of São Paulo. His first solo exhibition entitled “Jardín de Estratos” was presented in 2017 at Foro R-38 of the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana (Mexico City). He has been twice awarded the Young Creators’ Grant by the Mexican Secretariat of Culture in 2017 and 2019. He has participated in an artist-in-residence program at Fazenda Serinha in 2012 (Bragança Paulista, Brazil) and at Cobertizo in 2020 (Jilotepec, Mexico).