ESTUDIOS SOBRE UN PAISAJE

2022

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This exploration was born out of a personal interest in the different tones of earth observed while traveling on various roads in Mexico. Inspired by Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour, a color guide published in 1814 that cataloged colors found in the natural world and served as a descriptive guide for Darwin on his expeditions.

The collection began over seven years ago, and the idea of capturing the different tones on the canvas emerged with the intention of presenting a place according to its chromatology. Extracting the different tones present in the earth of the same territory frees them from the chromatic relativity of their original environment, allowing for a comparison between different lands found in different areas of the place.  While not scientific or technical in nature, it is an exercise in simplifying and visualizing the tonal relationship that exists in a territory.

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This serie is part of the exploration carried out during an art residency at Ohla Studio in San Miguel de Allende in 2022. They display the earth extracted from La Colorada (a mountain known locally by that name due to the color of its soil) and El Charco del Ingenio. The dirt was classified by hue, luminosity, and saturation, and then sifted for grain size separation. In the piece “La Colorada and El Charco,” the earth is arranged in the form of a crossword puzzle, with each square presenting a pure tone extracted from these two places and located within the canvas based on its chromatic relationship with the other dirt collected. The piece is intended to be a riddle where the precise order of each tone must be found, providing a visual reinterpretation and chromatic reorganization of San Miguel de Allende territory.

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In the other pieces, the neutral square resource is repeated to isolate only one of the tones found in the “La Colorada and El Charco” crossword puzzle and to break it down by its grain quality, as if zooming in on a pixel within the larger piece.