ROOMS
About the exhibition cycle
Attention
The series of four exhibitions at Plataforma, Attention, is the result of multiple studio visits in Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana and Guadalajara. Far from imposing a narrative, this curatorial cycle proposes an open discussion between artists, geographies and languages to highlight the power of cross-reference as well as the direct experience of art.
The two group shows, as well as the two solo shows, reveal the unexpected affinities that come from singular practices. Attention oscillates between receptive attention and the urgent need to look, think and feel.
Rather than illustrating a fixed idea, the selection seeks to make itself an accessible meeting point, without either neutrality or imposed certainties. In a context where curatorial judgment can be seen as intrusive, this project hopes to harness the external but committed gaze that observes without feeling a need to define. Attention, in the end, is an invitation to experiment without prejudice.
About ROOMS
Leonardo Ascencio, Gabriel Boils, Cristian Franco, Andrew Roberts, Guadalupe Rosales & Juan Manuel Salas
Curator: Sacha Craddock
Curatorial cycle: Attention
ROOMS, is the first exhibition of the curatorial cycle Attention. Curated by Sacha Craddock, the second international guest curator at Plataforma, this exhibition, located on the first floor, invites us to experience a sensorially charged space in which differences can coexist.
ROOMS reimagines the exhibition space by locating a temporary scaffolding structure within the gallery. Rather than using neutral white cubes, each space has been collaboratively conceived, negotiated and constructed by individual artists and the curator. Reflecting both their individual and collective processes, the works function as both a physical structure and conceptual gestures which challenge the traditional relationship between an artist and the exhibition space.
Scaffoldings, which associate with construction as well as deconstruction, alludes to impermanence, adaptability, and the fluid boundaries between creation and collapse. By inhabiting these provisional spaces, each artist navigates the tension between artistic intention and everyday reality, to offer a metaphorical, layered, yet open-ended experience.
ROOMS Essay
The rooms that make up the exhibition Rooms are situated apart from the actual, preexisting walls on the ground floor at Plataforma. Instead of a series of neutral, ready-made, white spaces, each of the artists has, with an unusual level of collaboration and cooperation, shown an ability to think about occupying three-dimensional space. Very much about the process of arrival, as well as display, nothing has been easy in that everything, from the context to the work itself, must be imagined, agreed, constructed, and negotiated. Keen to not only make a space but to inhabit it, each of the artists has had to make physical and conceptual sense whilst hoping to provide a tentative sense for others. Each room represents a circumnavigation of inbuilt promise and division, a kind of discussion that undermines an expected relationship between artist and exhibition space.
Rooms is about utilising the close relation between the artist as person and the artist as maker, painter, imaginer, constructor, and mediator caught somewhere, somehow, between artistic promise and the everyday. Made of scaffolding, a basic aid to construction, as well as de-construction, Rooms represents a visible account of an accumulation and amalgamation of physical and conceptual understanding over time. Temporary, familiar, and yet often invisible, scaffolding in this case really does outline place and space. This use of the traditional, but unseemly material, denies any sense of permanent theatre. Having literally been inside and outside the process, the artists are embracing temporary effectiveness by negotiating a system of application and collapse. By pointing to a state before or after hope is solidified, Rooms expects to represent a state where a full, somewhat confusing metaphorical experience can also appear empty.
As a painter, Leonardo Ascencio Ramírez has a clear idea of the relation between complete, unfinished, and sketched work and the context in which it might exist. He installs here horns, a lightbox, slippers, and hanging chains, alongside paintings in various stages of completion. Filled with references to a struggle between hope and actuality, the artist mimics the escape tactics of youth, particularly as represented in the adolescent bedroom. The dream and fact that makes up, or mimics, an excuse for art, is also about the construction of this sort of cabinet of curiosities. His painting, which carries a Post Pop reference to the world, also conveys a shared sense of powerlessness. The approximate mock or mash-up of a graphic relation to the very familiar, where the bedroom becoming the studio, moves from reality to pretence, and the other way around. Bringing the table and chairs from his actual studio, Ascencio’s individual work breaks down in a true, yet invented, context. Decisions about what goes into the space bridges artistic hope and reality, to create a poetic fiction in three dimensions. Becoming a base for introspective thought, with computer internalization, the work reflects dreams and plans about how an artist or artwork might exist in the world.
Seeming more like a grown-up bedroom in the head, Guadalupe Rosales contributes to Rooms with a sensory portal of experience and expectation. On entering, reflective glass opens out the space, and the fairground has turned in on itself. By controlling the physicality of experience, by setting up a chamber of insistent personal thought, with significant, shiny as well as opaque surfaces, Rosales constructs a place that is in every way about pretence. With thick reflective glass surfaces that have been hazed, graffitied, and engraved, Rosales celebrates Angeleno culture, cars, and consciousness. Hazed, or hazy, the conscious movement from LA to GDL, where the artist wants to allude to what she knows specifically of GDL. Aware of the slight shift in culture across the border, by insisting on meshing local material with that brought from LA as well as marking out a formally recognisable territory, Rosales has constructed a narrowing down of space but an opening up, nonetheless, of one-to-one experience. The artist is alluding to something, somehow lovely, where particles of broken glass from car windows can be called street diamonds. Through a succinct relation to the signage of two and three dimensions, Rosales elevates the minutia of life lived.
As an artist enmeshed with the significance of the history of visual language, Juan Manuel Salas paints intricate images of place on a range of surfaces. His work is seamless in its allusion to both the construction and the deconstruction of the ruin. He still seems open to discussion, with the implication of an optimistic build-up as well as a demolition by natural or human means. A crumpled edifice, ruin, fresco, or folly engages with the historical folly of Western artistic expectations. Its role at circularly aping the Western romantic idea of collapse, of Acadia, and the grotto means that the artist has built a purely disposable place that also mimics the way in which a certain art history applies notions of timeless value. As a painter, Salas concentrates on moments and areas of representative focus. This, in turn, reflects a cancellation of ideas for something more real as the focus shifts across a pictorial landscape of jagged suggestion and fact. The context, built to be brought down, brings painting, with moments of freshness, to a temporary exhibition alluding to a permanent state.
Andrew Roberts’ work presents a low-lit presence left behind. Darkened, glowing with low-fi sound playing continuously, the work consists of two stages of time. In a way, the show is in the performance, not the recording, yet the space must continue to carry a residue of life, sound and gesture. Noir, somewhat filmic in its experience, the sound, with the recording made from the actual performance on the opening night, played on an analog machine. The surrounding scaffolding makes perfunctory sense while the apparent operating table in the centre, covered in shiny metal, is host to a rubbery mask, lying as if abandoned, or recently pulled off. The contrast between an aspiration to create atmosphere and its after effect, or strangely lit glow, implies that some sort of life has affectively passed through the space–a gothic play on absence as well as a spirited attempt to maintain the scene with a presence. The hint of transformation, from real to monster, from alive to dead, from being effective and actual in terms of the singer and a dreamt opportunity to commission music and have it sung by a professional opera singer, leaves a fulsome question of high and low expectations.
With a symbolic structure set to function at varying states of political and conceptual statement, Cristian Franco is making, and taking, a stand. At a choice or contrary angle to the actual walls at Plataforma, an automatous structure, with somewhat 1930s reference to shared colonial and colonised architecture, to cinema, advertising, and art, with moulded busts, or heads, with strong-state reference, and eagle insignia, is topped by a supermarket trolley. The trolley, owned by Javier Robles, an unhoused, homeless friend of the artist who drew a series of architectural ruminations, one of which the supporting structure is also loosely based on. This symbolic monument acts as an autonomous altar to the distraught, difficult, and downright ridiculous in contemporary life. The fact of the material symbolically placed construction plays conceptually between a build-up of symbolism and the reality of a vehicle that must remain in transit. In the same way that a church building will inevitably uphold and allow an exceptional and unusual level of belief to be projected onto often tawdry elements within, this level of symbolism suggests a monument not to just a memorial to what has happened but to the role of an artwork itself that can claim privilege of place and gain attention to question and rage against the contradiction of a life lived as well as the forces that will inevitably close it down.
Gabriel Boils has produced a complete, light-touched, plastic skin of architectural conceit and promise. Using basic material, he builds an illusory reference to the inevitably denied promise of value. He entertains a cartoon of an idea with sophisticated light touch. The promise of pretence and play alludes to an illustration of an extension of space and place. The re-interpretation of the allusion to fake Baroque detail, with reference to maps from colonial times, or perhaps a doorway, with an outline that builds, lightly, and in a deliberately perfunctory manner. This bravado of plastic power and glory, outlined in marker pan, makes an inbuilt metaphor for art, with a complete dematerialisation of gesture and hope. Instead of entering the space, the allusion is a pure transparent folly of grandiosity. With galvanised metal turned in on itself, and shiny metal of flattened crisp packets, this mimicry of power, light and gesture means that Boils, who takes Rooms to another place, alludes, consciously and unconsciously, to the ever-growing nature of the perfunctory construction in and around the city of Tijuana where he lives.
Copyright Sacha Craddock May 2025
