Opening: Saturday September 23th
Max Gómez Canle offers his unusual downward gaze as he ponders on the landscape and its representation. Through a series of paintings and notes, he scrutinizes puddles of water, blurring the distinction between man and nature in landscape paintings, where humans serve as spectators and the landscape is organized mathematically through perspective.
What occurs when one looks at a puddle and finds the same elements of the landscape reflected without any order, challenging the long-established use of perspective as a resource by which humans organize and consume? It is akin to an intimate scale of the landscape; the objects remain the same but are arranged differently and presented in an intimate way. Hence the idea of creating small paintings, capturing the minimum scale of the vast pool within the aquifer of the Paraná basin, gradually diminishing in size in the marshes until it manifests in the puddles encountered during a stroll.
When scrutinizing puddles, the gaze encounters the flora and fauna, what is reflected and floating, and our own image immersed in these elements. Gómez Canle recreates them through the poetics of his characters: the autobiographical beast (the artist, the observer), the geometry, conceived and developed by humans, and the mountain, a kind of animation of geological time, from a different era.
These puddles are also worlds where diverse elements coexist, spaces in which the artist revisits several clichés of the coastal landscape: palm trees, lapacho trees in bloom, the red earth. It is an updated study of how water appears in painting.
Fernando Farina
