TODAS PARTES

Daniela Elbahara is proud to present “Todas Partes,” Ricardo González’s 3rd solo show in the gallery. Thoughtful about trajectory, we celebrate the Mexican painter’s mid-career and our 5th-year anniversary.

These new sets of oil paintings were recently produced in Mexico City, where the artist relocated temporarily from New York. His current studio is around the neighborhood where he grew up, and in a sense, he has been reconnecting with his early motivations to make art. This project has also been an encounter with his childhood “shadows” that might be lurking in his present background.

The paintings are made in a manner in which the emotive hand is omnipresent in the strokes and in the dynamism of the images. Looking closely at the works, there is always a hand or hands as if reaching out for something or grasping to keep things together. The richness of oil paint, with its empasto and ever-changing sheens, gives the works an empowering charge in which these “shadows” can exist to remind the viewer of their presence.

“These shadows are hidden parts of ourselves that are always present, lurking in the background, looking back at us smiling as if inviting us to accept their inevitability. They are not necessarily “bad” or “good,” which is why they present themselves both charming and menacing, depending on the viewer’s judgment or projection. These “shadows” appear gathered together or by themselves smiling at the viewer. Sometimes they are completely fragmented, floating around as an abstract shape, and other times they manifest in the shape of a black cat staring out at us.”

The title refers to these dark entities being in all of us; we all carry our own and as well as in society as a whole, like Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. These are our impulses, our manias, our desires, and motivations coming from the deep dark sea of our being.

“His is a journey marked by the questioning of experience itself, until what is reached is sovereign laughter, non-knowledge, and a Presence in no way distinct from Absence, where the mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist.”

Georges Bataille, “Inner Experience” (1943)