María Portilla
FLAT WORLD
- Residence
- 23.03.2023 — 29.06.2023
We have an artist who focuses her practice on a playful, sometimes ironic use of color; always seeking a lack of solemnity in the face of artistic material and matter; and exploring and drifting around the limits of portraiture.
Within this residence, María creates a visual and graphic study of an object as common as it is mysterious. From here, we see an object-thing as something that once lost its many names, something that, in the midst of a cultural overthrow, was reduced to a misunderstanding. Today, it's called a tortilla, the flat world.
To say "World" is a simple analogy, referring to its shape: like stars, circular? But more so, to allude to the poetic sense of the place where everything contained, everything to be contained, goes. "Flat" is a wink, and we wonder about that who, from a position of power, overpowers, imposes, and renames something.
Just the tortilla, Tlaxcalli Like one of the lost names, made, one by one, between the palms with the nixtamal, or with the machine that traces them based on their industrial necessity. The tortilla itself, transgressed, transcended, like a map of new worlds, expressing and diluting pigments extracted from molds and yeasts, be they orange, pink, green, or vermilion: a thousand hundred of them all.
Within this residence, María creates a visual and graphic study of an object as common as it is mysterious. From here, we see an object-thing as something that once lost its many names, something that, in the midst of a cultural overthrow, was reduced to a misunderstanding. Today, it's called a tortilla, the flat world.
To say "World" is a simple analogy, referring to its shape: like stars, circular? But more so, to allude to the poetic sense of the place where everything contained, everything to be contained, goes. "Flat" is a wink, and we wonder about that who, from a position of power, overpowers, imposes, and renames something.
Just the tortilla, Tlaxcalli Like one of the lost names, made, one by one, between the palms with the nixtamal, or with the machine that traces them based on their industrial necessity. The tortilla itself, transgressed, transcended, like a map of new worlds, expressing and diluting pigments extracted from molds and yeasts, be they orange, pink, green, or vermilion: a thousand hundred of them all.
Maria Portilla speaks of these things through her colors; her names are colors; she sings them, fixed in their course and progression. It's not so much the mold itself or its container—we no longer know whether it's the canvas or the tortilla—but rather the projections and transformations that lie beyond their representation: their quality as stain, tension, contour, and surface that unseems them, split and disconnected, not as a theme but as a derivation. It illuminates a separate world, as fascinating as it is disposable: expressed in the possibilities of its chromatic and compositional tensions, taken to the field—expressed from the abstract—or rendered as an object in something that, although it appears to be a still life, is a portrait, desacralizing the boundaries between the product shot, the label, and the subject.
The theme itself dissolves like the colors that bend in the games that mimic the organic geometries inherent to mushrooms as a territory, as a body of text, a writing that contains itself in order to overflow, that embraces what its own nature says, denying it.
These are portraits, in the most general sense of the term, just as a portrait is a photo taken from space of Earth (or any other planet), or of a coral reef (or the jellyfish it houses). What María creates is a portrait that rises above the flat world described by the tortilla, transformed into a small ecosystem that traces and advances in patterns and textures, colors and degradations, in compositions that highlight its decomposition, whether real or conceptual: its sublimated disintegration.
The theme itself dissolves like the colors that bend in the games that mimic the organic geometries inherent to mushrooms as a territory, as a body of text, a writing that contains itself in order to overflow, that embraces what its own nature says, denying it.
These are portraits, in the most general sense of the term, just as a portrait is a photo taken from space of Earth (or any other planet), or of a coral reef (or the jellyfish it houses). What María creates is a portrait that rises above the flat world described by the tortilla, transformed into a small ecosystem that traces and advances in patterns and textures, colors and degradations, in compositions that highlight its decomposition, whether real or conceptual: its sublimated disintegration.
