SMOOTH LOVING ROOM PER SE

Gabriela Mendizábal, Mexico City, 1997.
She graduated from St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2016-21. Gabriela has had group exhibitions in Mexico and the United States. She is currently enrolled in the Painting Certification Program at The New York Studio School. To date, her works have been acquired and transported to various parts of the world, including London, San Francisco, and New York.


Gabriela Mendizabal is a Mexican artist who paints in order to both depict and cope with life's motions of spillage. Such motions slosh within and over all bodies and their itinerant personalities as they relate to one another; it is as if she endeavored to soothe her viewers into coping with the flux that her work declares as existential fact.

The subject matter of Mendizabal's work is beholden to rituals of pigment, textile and gesture. Her paintings are bacchanalian and strange, and the world that they raise is one of surface mystery and boundlessness. Forces reach through her canvases and twist into compositions of a wavering discordance.

Lines, like impulses, materialize and ecstatically dissolve, spilling from and eliminating spaciousness. Her brushwork wafts, smears, pushes, pulls and darts–successfully apexing and tearing. A sort of ecstatic holism is implied, and the viewer is humbled into wondering if such things as emptiness and fixed differences exist.

The work embodies existence as something that is always on the line. Will or won't there be resolution? Indeed, will or won't there be a composition? Harmony and discordance burgeon from same-said gestures, making flesh of the temporary nature of resolution.

Mendizabal, applying brush strokes like musical notation, delicately muscles the forces of her work into objects of integrity. That is, into paintings that are as beautiful as they are uncanny. It's the integrity of the compositions that soothe the viewer into being with the visceral uncertainty of the work's character.

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Gabriela Mendizábal is a Mexican artist who paints both to capture and survive the movements of life's spills. These spill into and over all bodies and their itinerant personalities as they interact with one another. It's as if she strives to calm her viewers so they can cope with the flow, which her work declares as an existential fact.

The subject matter of Mendizábal's work is subject to rituals of gesture and pigment. His paintings are bacchanalian and strange, and the world they depict exists between mysterious surfaces and the immensity they reveal. Energies and moods flow through his canvases and twist into compositions of wavering discordance.

The lines, like impulses, materialize and dissolve in ecstasy, overflowing and eliminating spaciousness. His brushstrokes float, stain, push, pull, and launch, successively emerging and tearing apart. A kind of ecstatic holism is implied, before which the viewer might be dismayed, wondering if such things as emptiness and limits really exist.

The work embodies existence as something always at stake. Will there be a resolution or not? Indeed, will there be a composition or not? Harmony and discordance emerge from the gestures themselves, embodying a document that emulates temporality.

Mendizábal, applying brushstrokes like musical notation, delicately forces the elements of his work into objects of integrity. That is, into paintings that are as beautiful as they are mysterious. Perhaps it is the integrity of the compositions that reassures the viewer of the visceral uncertainty of the work's character.

Savannah Burton, 2023