The curtain begins to rise, the page is about to turn, the W key is an instant away from being pressed, the reading is about to begin, the library and the ruins are close to extinction. It seems that Jorge Méndez Blake (Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1974) has found a way to suspend, to prolong such interstitial lapses/spaces. It is in the poetics and the fate of these that his work takes place.
This retrospective exhibition integrates a group of works conceived by this prolific and interdisciplinary artist during the last two decades. Its deployment in the exhibition space does not follow a chronological order and is articulated by tacitly evoking a scenographic, architectural and interstitial space: the proscenium. In particular, those that were a central part of the ancient Greek and Roman theaters. Liminal spaces between the orchestra and the stage where the action took place.
Immersed in his own prosceniums, JMB exposes, diversifies and puts into play here the drive, the epicenter of his creative impulse: to transfer, project, translate to the field of visual arts core questions about the nature of language, the vast field of literature and architecture. In his avid and plural reading exercise, this artist edits, recycles, corrupts and reinterprets literary works and spaces of various kinds (libraries and amphitheaters) to weave a range of simultaneous narratives through painting, drawing, video, sculpture, installation and the binomial writing/reading. He writes, un-writes and re-writes in order to ask himself, as the semiologist Roland Barthes did: Where does reading begin? How far does it go? Can we assign a structure, boundaries, to this production?
Let us enter the amphitheater, let us open the discussion, the democratic exchange! Let us defile the library, its archetypal order, the sterile repetition of slogans and stultified knowledge! As JMB does: Let’s defend poetry and imagine other literatures!
Víctor Palacios
Curador