“Perhaps the world is folded in two” (1)

Thinking about the action of unfolding takes us simultaneously to the present and the past. Something had to happen to be unveiled or in vain rewound. In photography, folding implies an irremediable aggression or rupture against the materiality of the medium, which generally appears as a smooth, continuous and two-dimensional surface. However, photography appears and is, due to the transition between its opposites —negative and positive, visible and invisible, absence and presence, real and fiction, digital and analog, liquid and solid, fixity and movement, etc—, a paradox that is not unrelated to the practice of Menchelli, which focuses on expanding the language and the various conceptions of the medium by means of abstraction and the revision of its own apparatus. In this series, the artist disrupts the photographic object materially and discursively, creating hybrids that respond to an interaction between photography and other cultural practices.

There is a conscious distance from the massive and immediate use of photography and the image in Menchelli’s practice. Most of her works come from analogous methodologies used mainly during the invention of the medium, which entail a prolonged time and an almost artisanal approach, intertwined with scientific knowledge. The pieces in the series I carry all the names I’m given (2), alludes to the basis of photography: the recording of light on a sensitive material. Here, the artist folds and unfolds the color photosensitive paper in the darkroom and exposes it to different temporalities of light, which on its way to its final destination passes through a color filter. It is worth mentioning that the color we see in the final image is not that of the filter, it is its opposite. Therefore, it is the same photographic paper that provides the abstract forms that we see registered in the piece. The sheet works as a support and tool for creating its own image. As in origami, the artist assembles and disassembles the paper, generating the various figures and nuances that we see. Each fold and visible line demarcates an exposure of light and a different color filter. The work is made up of fragments, unique and autonomous frames. Multiple exposures in a single image. Material and visual interruptions. Unlike conventional photography, this form of production does not allow a delicate and exact handling of the creation processes. In the darkroom, Menchelli sees the image she is creating only at the moment of development and fixation, not before. Photography is created blindly, from an almost elusive interaction between memory and the sense of touch. Depending on the scale of the paper, the task of bringing the work into the world becomes an exercise that involves the whole body, a complicated and exhaustive exchange between the artist and the photograph.

Fragmentation is natural to the medium of photography, it is built from the selection and omission that comes from framing. It rarely presents itself as multiple, much less as transparent, presenting the traces and marks of its own production. Generating these creases and breaks forces it to lose its two-dimensional state, rectangular boundary, and pristine character. Instead, the photograph becomes a haptic object, full of gestures, details and errors. It goes against its reproducible nature, and it becomes unique. That error makes it human, or rather, that error is the visible record of the human trace. Photography in its most material but elusive character, concrete but indefinable, rigorous but imperfect, favors the deconstruction of its own system and expected functionality. At the same time, it alludes to one of the fundamental roles of photography: to be another form of visual perception beyond the possibilities of the human eye. Margaret Iversen citing Rosalind Krauss explains the relationship between photography and the fragment in the surrealist movement as a hybrid model, taking montage as writing: “The spacing makes it clear that we are not looking at reality, but at the world infested with interpretations of meanings” (3). Photography as writing through montage enables the multiple. The editorial and photographic media are linked by memory. The evolution of humanity is tied to remembering, to having a faithful vestige of the past. When we went from orality to the invention of writing, the latter allowed for the first time “[…] to lengthen the life of memory by fixing words” (3) and therefore ideas. Photography does not freeze time, it records a time, and in its most basic version it allows another type of data, apparently more faithful and objective than words. We seek at all costs to prolong life in general, even more, “historically the materials and substances of art have been chosen for their longevity rather than for their meaning” (4).

Unlike how the works operate in the editorial environment, here they take on different scales, always in relation to the human body. Photograms are experienced beyond the physical limits of the book or the photographic paper, leaving aside their individual quality to dialogue with the other pieces, with the space and the support that hold them; they merge with other existing elements around them. Added to the fact that “In visual perception, color is almost never as it really is —as it physically is” (5), and thanks to the sculptural folds of the pieces, the color in the frames is conditioned to the architecture, the shades and intensities vary according to the spatial context and lighting external to them. In the darkroom, Menchelli had to project or imagine color in its sculptural version, generating a tension between the trace of the photographic ghost and the present from which the work is exhibited and observed, where it is finally fixed and complete. This combination of elements makes the viewer’s reading path less predictable, since they are works whose edges are difficult to define. There is a dialogue in the interaction of the fragments, between the beginning and the end of each fold, line or limit, but there is also a break in visual sequentiality; generating something else, a passage between the frame and the object, the image and the sculpture. After all, repetition is visibility and certainty. Here the irruption and the difference make it impossible to trace a path.

– Laura Orozco

(1) Cristina Rivera Garza, Newton’s disk: Ten Essays on Color, Mexico City, Bonobos Editores, National Autonomous University of Mexico, General Directorate of Cultural Diffusion, 2011, p. 44.

(2) The title of this work is an excerpt from the poem “A Piece of Writing that won me $200 in eighth grade” written by the artist and writer Manuel Arturo Abreu.

(3) Margaret Iversen, “The Surrealist Situation of the Photographed Object” in, Stephen Melville (ed.), Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005, p. 188.

(4) Christian Scheidemann, “Material as Language in Contemporary Art” in, Stephen Melville (ed.), Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005, p. 76

(5) Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, Yale University, 1963, p. 1

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I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022

I.

He lies on his left side. His head rests like a stone atop the pillow, causing creases and ripples to form in every direction. His body rises softly under the blankets that hang and sag around him. His right side curves up to the top of his head, up and around the outline of his ear, contouring down the crevice of his neck, then over the top of his shoulder, the fold of his arm, to the drop to his rib cage. He lies with his back to her in the bed, the softness of his shape of bone and ligaments, and joints, and musculature—the shape of his mass—hidden beneath his blanket of skin covered by the fabric that blankets him.

He lies with his back to her. He faces the interior of the room, oblivious to the window behind her where beams of sunlight slowly begin to caress their way across the ceiling, dancing quietly into the corners of the room, extending their reach further and further.

They lie side by side, neither body touches the other. The palm of a hand rests on the surface of the bed, the crook of an elbow in front of a torso, the bend of the leg at the ball and socket of the hip, an inclination of a knee. Both chests rise and fall in near syncopation, floating up then down with every inhalation and exhalation, every breath in and out, and in again. Each soft and subtle movement is as slow and methodical as the erosion of earth over time, like changes and transformations of the planet, the continents, the land masses themselves.

They lie there in the slowness of sleep, two lovers in one bed, a composition of possibilities and perspectives. He faces out, she faces him, their two bodies like two mountain ranges flowing up then down against the horizon of the bed. Two bodies like formations of earth created in the intersections that collide and cause collisions of time and space and geography, the collateral damage of the daily movement of earth around sun.

II

Is there a difference in the life of a mountain during the day and during the night? It is the same range, the same piercing geography, the very same interruption of time and space that stands high and still and wide while the earth rotates daily. The range is a revolution, an aberration of geology, a physiology of deformations forged over a billion seconds and microseconds of time. It is a quiet revolt of adjustments and flexes, of silent curves and crests that defies gravity.

The mountain is not just a mountain. It is the peak of contrast that rises against the curtain of constellations and formations of stars that extend across the field of darkness that is night. It is all the ecosystems that exist together in the careful balance of light, elevation, flora and fauna against the backdrop of sunlight, land and rocks built up and around in quiet aggressions of natural intersections of peaks and formations, parabolas and curves that exist in the contrasts and nuances between both light and dark. It is the slow and quiet breath of two lovers existing side by side, quietly eroding with the rotation of a planet that transitions from night to day.

III.

Dawn extends her veil in the world beyond them. Clouds race across the gradient sky of grays, blues, pinks, and golds of a rising sun, of a planet in revolution. Clouds and earth move in opposite directions. White nebulae fold in and over each other like waves of an ocean cascading in and through, racing across and eclipsing sky in a hurried sprint from night to morning. The two lovers lie there in the very same bed, the presence of one confirming the existence of the other, two bodies side by side like their own small planets, their own little universes of ecosystems and concerns, their only commonality being the atmosphere they share in that exact moment between sleep and wakefulness.

Their two bodies lie parallel to each other, sharing atmosphere, sharing a bed. He faces out, she faces him. If her eyes were open she would see the topography of freckles moving with his quiet rhythm of breath, a landscape that ebbs and flows like a map of rocks and trees and one thousand tiny tendernesses forming in the quiet evolution that spreads up and down and across the length of his back.

She is one of two bodies existing through the existence of the other. Two perspectives of being reliant on one another, a relationship made obsolete with absence. He faces out, she faces him, two formations of rock and earth and body that lie along the horizon of a bed, sharing space and atmosphere and existence before night becomes day and their individual universes begin to part ways.

ProxyCo gallery is pleased to present Parallax, the first individual exhibition in New York City for the Mexico City-based artist Fabiola Menchelli.

In optics and astronomy, parallax describes a shift in the apparent position of an object, which depends on the embodied experience from which the object is observed. The cameraless images in this body of work begin in the darkroom, as light touches the surface of photosensitive paper and trace the contours of a physical object. Harnessing volatile techniques like multiple exposures and solarizations, Menchelli then constructs a macrocosmic image from layers upon layers of microcosmic experimentation. The scale of the resulting image is amplified, further exaggerating the figurative and literal distance between the object and its representation, the image becomes autonomous simultaneously pushing and pulling our own sense of perception.

Through an elegant balancing of sense and reason, touch, and recognition, Menchelli presents us with interior and exterior horizons of remarkable depth. The artworks in the exhibition arrive as an intimate reflection: an image looking back at us, touching us, facing us with immensity.

I am immensely grateful to everyone that supported me and the creation of this work for the past three years. Thank you to Alex, Laura, and Javier from ProxyCo Gallery. Thank you to FocoLab and to LTI/Lightside for their incredible help in producing this show. Thank you to all the people that helped me in the studio at different points, Emily Kind, M Prull, Paul McAllister, Carla González Vergara, and Darinka Lama. To Priscila Vaneuville, Tere Carter, and my beautiful family, thank you for being there high and low. Special thank you to all the brilliant people that helped me articulate this project, Kevin Sweet, Laura Orozco, Beatriz Díaz, and my students.

This project would not be possible if not for the generous support of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores del Arte from Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes in México. Thank you.

Utilizing a diverse range of processes, Menchelli explores the contemplative influence of internal and external space. Featuring work from two different periods including five new polaroid prints, the exhibition connects the underlying ideas in Menchelli ́s work, using the language of abstraction to reinterpret space through the medium of photography.

This exhibition presents work from two different periods that connect the underlying ideas in Menchelli´s work, using the language of abstraction to reinterpret space through the medium of photography. Menchelli started working with cyanotypes in 2014, a process that connects the history of photography with architecture and its early use in blueprints dating back to the late 19th century. As an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Menchelli produced a series of unique darkroom-based, angular abstractions including two prints in the exhibition.

In 2015, an observatory at Casa Wabi in Oaxaca became Menchelli’s source of inspiration for two recent bodies of work. Designed by Tadao Ando as a site for deep contemplation, the concrete structure’s aperture is abstracted using multiple exposures in Menchelli’s series of monochromatic echoes (Ellipse, 2015) and cyanotypes (Bajo el Sol Azul, 2017). The resulting works on view speak to her continual investigations about the poetics of space, observation, and light.

Ellipse is an interconnected group of seven double exposures prints that reverberate across separate panels like the waves crashing just outside Ando’s observatory, initiating a visual dialogue larger than the sum of its parts. In Bajo el Sol Azul, the artist translates the curvature and contemplative experience of the physical space reconnecting the concrete structure of the observatory to the sky it was designed to observe. Deep blues and misty gradients of light only hint at the structure within, allowing the void of space beyond to invite reflection. Lastly, a series of Polaroid prints also made at Casa Wabi, shown for the first time, capture the influence of the Light & Space and Constructivism art movements in Menchelli’s contemporary practice.

You can visit the exhibition online at this link:
UNDER the BLUE SUN.

PROXYCO gallery is pleased to present Light Studies by Mexico City-based artist Fabiola Menchelli at ARCO E-XHIBITIONS.

Using the camera to transmute reality, Fabiola Menchelli combines diverse perspectives in a single plane, generating a dimension that exists only within the camera. The images from this body of work are constructed inside of the camera exposing the light-sensitive surface multiple times altering the object, shapes, and colors, thus generating different planes of light that are combined in the latent image.

Featuring tree photographs made with one of the few 20 x 24″ Polaroid cameras that exist in the world. The result is a two-dimensional photographic image, the edge of the piece transforms the image into an object, revealing the developing process. The work produces a tension between the intangible and the concrete to reveal the raw material that constitutes the photographic process. Reveling the subjectivity of the lens, the camera is conceived as a perceptual apparatus that points inside itself to create the image. Seeking to question the ontological nature of the photographic medium and elevate the space of representation beyond the paradigms of perception.

LINK TO 3D VIEW

VERSUS: FRANCISCO CASTRO LEÑERO & FABIOLA MENCHELLI
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
Open to the public  under strict hygiene measures and healthy distance from
October 5th to 24th 2020.
Monday-Friday 10am – 3pm / 4pm – 7pm. Saturday 11am – 2pm.

Appointments: info@arroniz-arte.com y al el 5555117965.
Tabasco 198, Col. Roma, 06700, CDMX, México

Starting with the title itself, the show Versus Fabiola Menchelli and Francisco Castro Leñero proposes an opposition of artists, visions, and mediums. Photography versus painting; capture vs creation; 3D versus 2D. However, the result of the encounter between seemingly these disparate works is to generate a conversation between two ways of using abstraction to approach and engender the creation of new spaces.
In the case of Castro Leñero’s pieces, we are presented with a flat surface created by many coats of paint on top of each other which gives the feeling of looking at an architectural blueprint. Each painting presents a grid that in turn suggests a space in which arches of different colors repeat and reflect, giving a sense of movement. The painting becomes a kind of labyrinth to the viewer.

Menchelli´s works offer us a series of black and white photographs that look almost like paintings. In them, the photographic object mutates. The different exposures give the illusion of depth, of looking at a 3D space in which the viewers must make sense of the different layers. The images suggest a meteorite, a play on starlight, or the pattern of waves in water.

In both artists’ pieces, we see the result of a systematic process, a balance of control and freedom that has left a mark in the work. On one side, the grid and the operations of Leñero’s plane are carefully measured, some freehand strokes and others made with rulers. In Menchelli’s work, the superposition of the layers of light and the times of exposures are affected by the control of the parameters, experimentation, and by serendipitous mistakes.

This conversation does not stay within the artwork. When the pieces move past their material inspirations, the conversation spills over into the imagination of the viewer. What is hiding in the movement of Castro Leñero’s grid or deep in the watery shadows of Menchelli? The works do not impose an answer; rather, they give the question and then welcome us into the conversation. The meaning is up to us. These meditative spaces—not only in the pieces themselves but also in the space created by the encounter of the two artists—are not empty vessels waiting for us to make sense of them. They do not cage the viewer into one single interpretation and point of view but rather open up before us like pathways. They become, in effect, points of entry.

Andrea Chapela

Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
Tabasco 198, Col. Roma, 06700, CDMX, México
Hours: Monday-Friday 10am – 3pm / 4pm – 7pm
Saturday 11am – 2pm. Gallery closed on holidays.

I.

It sits in the hand like a small weight. It folds itself in and over, willingly being contained while resisting structure as it falls through the fingers that attempt to accommodate it. It sways and bends with the gestures of the hand that holds it, spilling over and between as it moves and reacts. At once it pulls itself together and apart, both attracting and detracting as gravity and space push and pull.

The granules are cool to the touch. They hold moisture that acts as a binding agent that creates mass and density. Each grain is inevitably miniscule, its weight singularly insignificant. But how is insignificance defined if the collective weight and mass of a singular object culled together creates something bigger than one’s human vision can process?

The sand stretches as far as the horizon allows one to see. It is expansive in its clarity, a stark white that glitters and reflects with the rays of the sun that fall heavily upon it. A clear blue horizon floats lightly in its backdrop, creating the illusion of a perfect line that dips and bends according to the wave of small, mountainous dunes that rise and fall as accumulation responds to the whims and desires of the wind.

II.

I am standing on a cliff overlooking the North Sea. My eyes struggle to bring the horizon into focus. The atmosphere lies thick and heavy in front of me, blurring the clarity of gravity and causing a sense of vertigo that is exacerbated by the lack of definition between sea and sky.

They tell me that I am looking at the border between two countries. That in the distance, in the horizon that distinguishes neither up nor down, a border divides one from another. The only division I see is the humidity that sits like a blanket, rising from the sea as thick and heavy as the sea itself, and extending up into the heavens as though the two are one combined being of atmosphere and molecules. Collectively it creates a thick sheet that extends beyond vision, that discombobulates the senses, and turns ground and sky upside down.

Gravity does not exist here. The ground becomes sky, and the sky becomes sea, and the horizon an inequitable line that refuses definition.

III.

Graphite marks against the whiteness of the page curve and strike and make letters in consonants and vowels that form the words of a sentence. The rhythmic tension of implied sound fills the brain with implicated tone and builds a quiet cacophony of sentences that turn into a paragraph. Containing means recontaning as words spill over the page and fall into the next one, building and forcing an architecture of language, a dialect of expression.

The word is the grain, the sentence the solitary line of the horizon, the paragraph the mountain that climaxes to its peak and down again. Existence is the unacknowledged contradiction of the microcosmic creating the macrocosmic then the two reconstructing and rebuilding.

IV.

We sit together in darkness, a gesture counterintuitive to understanding the depth of space. We allow ourselves to lose the horizon, once again eliminating gravity. The paradigm of darkness begins to reflect the paradigm of viewing. The horizon becomes the darkness of space itself, its delineation a defiant and stubborn mass of ambiguous tenebrosity.

Our eyes begin to adjust simultaneously and darkness is no longer darkness, but a new way of seeing lightness. Two ways of looking and seeing that cannot exist without the other.

The grain of sand takes shape, bending and folding in and over itself. It forms the dunes that build and grow vertically, creating the contrast of line from which our eyes translate the distinction of a horizon, and from a distance, the grain becomes the mountain.

Fundacion Casa Wabi is pleased to present the last exhibition of the 2019 exhibition cycle at Casa Santa Maríala Rivera. Fabiola Menchelli closes this season with an exhibition that talks about the cycles, the rotation of the stars, and the way we measure the passage of time, observing the light.

One of the most interesting approaches of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is that in the vicinity of a sufficiently massive astral body, the path of light can be bent by gravitational force. Apparent variations in the position of distant stars can be observed when they pass near a star or mass, effectively doubling the light. In The curvature of Light, Fabiola Menchelli’s work shapes form through multiple exposures, thus intervening space and reality.

The exhibition consists of several pieces that were created during her residency at Casa Wabi in 2015. In a detailed study of an architectural element inside the house designed by Tadao Ando, ​​Menchelli, addresses the observatory during the 28 days of his home.

The observatory, thought by Tadao Ando as a site of deep contemplation, in turn studies and delimits an image, frames a specific universe, everything that is within that threshold. In this case, the artist proposes to deconstruct that ellipse, creating a narrative of her own. Constructing a new map of that universe, using the curvature of the lines to display a stellar atlas that measures time and at the same time replicates the waves of the sea.

Literally drawing with light, the works blur the boundaries between the solid edges of the observatory and the vast and impenetrable sky. The layers generated through the multiple exposures inside the chamber, metaphorically fold over each other. The work speaks not only of the light and the space it illuminates, the time and cycles in which we live, but also of the subtle revolutions we experience as a result of deep contemplation.

The centerpiece consists of 13 books: one for each lunar cycle that happens during the year. In total the books bind 364 images that measure 24 centimeters each, in line with the 24 hours of the earth day. Each book is composed of 28 photographs, one for each day of the lunar cycle; thus creating a lunar calendar. The work uses the horizon as a line to establish a connection between the cycles of the moon, the tides and the way we connect to these cycles through our personal experience. The exhibition will be open to the public for 13 weeks and each week a different book will be shown, bending time, the course of a year is resolved in 13 weeks.

The exhibition Luego, la Forma, this fall at Galería de Arte Mexicano, elucidates on a process native to the plastic arts, the conjuring of the empirical from the intangible. The show weaves together the practices of Ramiro Chaves, Yeni Mao, Fabiola Menchelli, and Alejandra Venegas. The practices tease out drawings, paintings, sculptures or photos from the gooey transitional space between source and realization.

Venegas translates her surrounding landscape, processing it through the deceptive simplicity of gesture and mark-making. The works are an experiential reaction, digesting the landscape and pushing it through the automatic path from eye to hand. Also in conversation with his surroundings, Chaves uses multiple hands and multiple frames of reference. The cooperative works layer space and expression, a testimony to collective consciousness. Instead of creating environmental space like other large work, the seemingly endless scroll becomes a document of the process.

Concerned with the elemental nature of light as a defining force, Menchelli uses the incorporeality of light not only as a process but as a subject matter. The photos are about the photography, creating a feedback system that hums with mysticism, astronomy, and science fiction. In a similar closed-loop, Mao approaches the incorporeal through the mediation of embodiment. He works with architectonic suggestiveness, constructing a cyborg body solely through the surrounding framework. Various components and visual languages- expressions of craft, material building systems and modes of display- provide a sounding board of information.

This show is about process as expression, a physicality birthed from an impression, the form shaped from an ethereal whiff. The works decipher the way in which form is made. These practices are each an elucidation, a paraphrase, a decoding.

The work of these artists constantly deals with the notion of space or engages with specific spatial situations for their production and presentation. Although working in different media – painting, sculpture or photography – they privilege non-figurative and constructivist solutions and share, among other things, an interest in color and other pictorial concerns that can be tied to the legacy of monochrome painting and geometric abstraction. For this exhibition, they actively participated in different ways in its articulation and final arrangement. Considering the architecture of PROXYCO, the presence of their paintings, sculptures and photographs creates a complex spatial scene and establishes a new set of situational relations. As such, these interventions refuse to conceptualize space as a passive receptacle. Instead, their works deals with its transformation. It is space as a moment of change, a passage from one configuration to another.

Veronica Lehner´s work, produced specifically for this exhibition, uses the façade of the gallery as a point of departure. Connecting exterior with interior, a section of the glass frame seems to unfold towards the inside through a solution that gathers architectonic, sculptural and pictorial concerns. In the interior of the gallery the metallic grid of the façade is used to create various sculptural elements that serve as support of two surfaces of pure paint that hang and stretch from them and that seem to extend the color that the artist has applied on the window. This group of elements – in which the boundaries between architecture, sculpture and monochrome painting seem to blur – transform the way the space is perceived and accessed. Their presence determines a new spatial understanding of the gallery and some of its features, such as the paint of the window, that can even affect issues of light and reflection.

Ana Elena Garuz’s wall pieces highlight the presence of this constructive element and explore it as a plastic surface. Her work presents a study in line and materiality, and its relation with architecture, by alluding to the presence of a quotidian object: blue tape.

This kind of tape is pervasive in spaces that deal with art, such as studios, museum and galleries. For Garuz, this object can be seen through a poetics of the everyday. She alludes to it through painting and sculpture, in connection to a wall, in order to create a sort of mural in which color, rhythm, and materiality are paramount. Seen as a mural, her work recalls the perceptual and kinetic concerns of postwar modern art practices in Latin America and elsewhere.

Through multiple exposures and different constructivist solutions, Menchelli creates abstract compositions that seek to trace, translate, balance and expand the space within the frame in a simple gesture. The reference to Constructivism in her work can be understood in two different ways. On the one hand, they are actually photographic constructions as those realized by artists such as László Moholy Nagy, El Lizzitsky and other artists associated with the soviet historical avant-garde. On the other hand, her works have a painterly quality that can easily recall the Constructivist-Concrete legacy in Latin American modern art. Her photographs tend to establish a particular dialogue with the spaces where they are exhibited. Her images seem to open up to other complex spaces, articulated through different layers and with depth.

-Daniel Garza Usabiaga