Galleria Anna Marra is pleased to announce Paisaje a la montaña (Mountain landscape), the second solo exhibition in the gallery by the Mexican artist Andrés Anza. After the success of his first exhibition, the artist has returned to Rome with a project that is presented here for the first time, an intimate dialogue with the massive mountain, Cerro de la Silla, a geologic giant, that sits south of and towering over the city in which the artist was born, Monterrey.

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Far from being only a pure formal synthesis or an ornamental declination, often linked to the language of design, Anza’s works in ceramic bring into question any purely decorative intent, revealing themselves as profound reflections on the dynamics of living matter and they must surely be considered contemporary artistic research. In this new series of sculptures, the artist works a constant link between microcosm and macrocosm, ideally moving from microscope to telescope. The sinuous forms, the carved out cavities and characteristic protuberances of the works do not seek to become a sterile mimicking of nature, but rather they seek to evoke the lithesome morphology of microbiology and the artist’s fanciful botany as he portrays its unstoppable process of mutation, budding and lush proliferation. Contemporarily, these conformations open on to a sidereal dimension, reminding us of the order of the cosmos and the astronomic maps of parascientific epochs, joining in a single breath, the earth, the sky, the subterranean and the stars.

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In Paisaje a la montaña an exploration of the territory becomes a purely bodily experience. The curves and the torsions of the clay are not the creations of detached observation, but rather they record a physical rapport between the artist and the mountainous landscape, the movement of Anza’s body as it crosses space in its effort to climb, in the fluidity of his breath among the rocks, in his contact with the vegetation. His body acts as a sensitive seismograph interiorising the natural forces and then restoring them to us in clay in an approach that has an “animist flavour”. His sculptures are not static objects to be contemplated, but sentient presences, mysterious and vibrant organisms that contain within them, the latent impulses of movement, of vital life and metamorphosis.

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For this exhibition the gallery has been transformed into an organic habitat. In this temporary and shared ecosystem, his sculptures lose a purely objectual connotation and enter into symbiosis with their surrounding environment, inviting the visitor to an immersive, sensorial experience.

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This exhibition illustrates a significant turning point in the Mexican artist’s activity. Here he uses a new chromatic experiment. For the first time he has introduced dense, shiny and veiled glazes of colours ranging from deep blue to saturated earth hues, the visual consistency of these remind us both of how changeable the atmosphere of the mountains can be, as well as of the humid viscosity of biologic secretions and membranes. 

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The itinerary through the exhibition is guided and enriched by the text prepared by Marina Dacci, frees our reading of the artist’s works from one that is purely aesthetic, as it reveals the multiple facets of his biology transfigured by myth and corporeal experience.
 

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ITA

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