Víctor Palacios
The artistic practice of Adrián Guerrero (Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1975) is based on a continuous search for material, perceptual and philosophical intertwining. Once he has found these points of tension and interconnection, his task resides in two opposing but complementary actions. On the one hand, he synthesizes, subtracts and minimizes the infinite forms of expression through language and matter and, on the other, he endows them with a vast reflective and intellectual charge in which diverse disciplines and areas of knowledge coincide. To put it metaphorically, emptying and saturating simultaneously.
The present exhibition can be understood as a poetic corollary of the above. In this space there is a dialogue between a series of works that, through a meticulous use of drawing, sculpture and ceramics, incite the viewer to aesthetic experience and reflection on language, time and space. In particular, Guerrero emphasizes the ontological meanderings of what we understand by TIME. What is that which we call time and which, despite its abstract nature, conditions us at every instant? Countless literary, theoretical and artistic works have been written about it throughout history. Guerrero takes as the guiding thread of his proposal the brilliant philosophical disquisitions of the theologian Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430), whose famous reflection sums up this dilemma perfectly: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; but if I want to explain it to the one who asks me, I do not know”.
The essence of Adrian Guerrero’s work engages in evocative formal and conceptual dialogues with the work of Italian artist Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994) and his obsessive impulse to materialize and interrogate time. Here are his words: “Time is something fundamental; the basic principle of everything. There is not much that can be said about it; it is simply the basis. Whether it’s years, postage stamps or grids, everything has to do with time; it’s the only thing that’s really magical… its implausible elasticity. Everything has its own time”.