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January 12, 2025
"I understood that things are real and different, all of them, one from the other.
from each other;
I understood it with my eyes, never with my thoughts.
To understand with thought would be to find them all the same.
equal."
Alberto Caeiro
(Fernando Pessoa)
by Enrique Guillén Sáenz
For a long time, from the beginning of my training until just a few years ago, I tried to stay within the limits of "reality." Nothing that was not credible in painting interested me.
Contact with literature helped me to loosen the knots that tied me to that solid and heavy world in which I was trapped. I cannot, nor do I want to, deny my taste for painting, which is born from the deep observation of the "solid reality" because it has helped me to understand form, space and matter, hence my taste for still life and natural landscapes.
However, on this occasion I allowed myself to play a little with my imagination, to build stories and reconstruct memories in a more casual way, freeing myself from the formal weight of "serious painting" by including a lot of drawing and colors that I would not have allowed before.
I wanted to include in the exhibition sketches, color tests and notes of several paintings to share part of the work process and show the importance of drawing in my painting, as it is the primary tool with which I land ideas, with which I can change the mental world, decompose it and put it back together as I understand it. Drawing is thinking, it is a language that does not contain words, but weavings of lines and stains: graphite warps containing the world.
The pieces you are about to see are nourished by two sources: literature, on the one hand, and social problems, on the other. It is not my cause to talk about specific social facts, but I use them to raise questions of existence more related to human feelings. Problems such as forced disappearance, migration, poverty and childhood are addressed with the intention of them serving as a reminder of issues that we should not forget.
The veracity of these stories lies in the fact that their memory awakens in me sensations that I tried to address pictorially. The important thing is there, in the sensation that they could awaken, not in the fidelity of the facts or in the perfect description of the forms.
San Miguel de Allende, Gto.
2024
Instagram
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by Dr. Arturo Joel Padilla Córdova / Gestor Cultural
The work of Enrique Guillén Sáenz is the manifestation of an act of conscience that impels us to reflect on what is happening in a world devoid of containment; a world in which the structures that support, with a certain fragility, the scenarios inhabited by invisible, faceless beings, who carry a hope that they refuse to abandon, are collapsing.
The migrants, those anonymous figures who leave their roots with discouragement and an obligatory quota of pain, are increasingly incorporated into a conflict that succumbs to the inevitable: abandonment. With an imposing expressionist force and a remarkable handling of the technique, the work of the master Enrique Guillén confronts us through a delirious reality, in complicity with the lostness of his characters. With the predominance of grays and loose strokes, the rest of the colors appear in a circumstantial and masterful way, creating atmospheres with characters that float, almost ghostly, as if emerging from a fictitious and somber reality. Some of them, as if coming out of a literary narrative, exist in a desolate way, provided with a fiction that emanates from a crushing reality. In the works, the defined figures allow a frank reading, as if relating a text found in memory, while the figures that intertwine in their indefinition, succumb to the lost chaos of their own fiction. The defined and blurred lines allow the viewer to fluctuate between the abstract and the concrete, the found and the lost, reality and fiction, the frank and the dispersed gaze.
The work of the master Enrique Guillén Sáenz invites us to an obligatory encounter with those beings who, illuminated by the light of a light bulb and, sometimes, in the company of a dog, avoid shipwreck in their own conditions of abandonment, search and loss. Various animals accompany these faceless beings that suggest an identity that could belong to anyone, sometimes without realizing it. The pictorial exhibition is an encounter with the world to which we belong and for which we are responsible, whether we want it or not.
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Thematic nucleus text
In the last five years, the searching mothers of missing young people have given themselves the task of locating hundreds of them who, for reasons related to structural violence, have been deprived of their freedom and, in the worst of cases, of their lives. The pain has not stopped them and, many of them have found in this heartbreaking journey, death.
Theseus is now a pauper surrounded by a labyrinth of poverty, facing that monster that has devoured men and women to feed itself to the point of satiety. He walks with decorum, carrying the head of Asterion, the minotaur, among cardboard houses with tin roofs and plastic curtains, before the expectant gaze of a dog.
The student movement of 1968 left an indelible mark in the memory of a generation that thought of the action of a change of paradigms, until then insurmountable. Ideas confronted weapons and enthusiasm confronted intolerance. The persecuted were pushed and pulled out, attacking their rights and their own utopias.
Personal stories can have multiple interpretations, almost all of them stored in the artist's personal experience and memory. In the work, a person hides in the presence of two forces that are about to confront each other, maintaining a tension that could be resolved at any moment, while a stolen bicycle lies on the ground.
