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.

La Curvatura de la Luz

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.

Y LUEGO, LA FORMA
Ramiro Chavez, Alejandra Venegas, Yeni Mao & Fabiola Menchelli

Galeria de Arte Mexicano Sala: GAM
Gobernador Rafael Rebollar #43, San Miguel Chapultepec, CDMX, México
September 2019 to January 2020
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

Bajo el Sol Azul originated during Fabiola Menchelli’s 2015 residency at Casa Wabi, a Tadao Ando-designed residential compound for artists situated near Puerto Escondido, along the Oaxacan coast of Mexico. An observatory on the premises, intended by Ando as a site for deep contemplation, became Menchelli’s source of inspiration for a new body of work about the poetics of observation.

Over the course of 28 days, Menchelli photographed the shifting light that slipped into the observatory’s imposing, concrete structure. Capturing the rhythmic, cyclical shifts of the sun across multiple exposures, she began to transpose the physical dimensionality of the architecture into immeasurable space. The resulting images were printed with an 170 year-old photographic process called cyanotype, reproducing the rough, uneven curves of the observatory walls with a technique that’s notoriously difficult to control. Quite literally drawing with light, these new works were informed by the same wabi-sabi philosophy that inspired the building itself, one that embraces the imperfect and transient elements found in nature.

Menchelli presents ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ not only as spatial elements but also as temporal dimensions. By unifying multiple exposures, she blurs the boundaries between the observatory’s solid edge and the vast, impenetrable sky. The overlapping layers of blue tonalities metaphorically fold in upon one another, adding a depth and richness that both abstracts the spaces depicted and the time in, during and over which they were captured. By removing the clear visual referents via which one might more easily read or understand the image, Menchelli manipulates our own perceptive powers in order to complete the work.

In 1838, John Herschel, the inventor of the cyanotype, captured one of his earliest images through a circular window: that of a telescope belonging to his father, the renowned astronomer William Herschel. Somehow the act of looking beyond — of collapsing space and distance through the manipulation of our organs of perception and our sensory experience — also too creates a circular path linking Herschel, Ando and Menchelli. Each one looks beyond and then ultimately back, to reflect on the nature of the very thing they seek to capture. Through science, architecture, and photography their works speak not only to light and the spaces that it illuminates, but to the subtle revolutions we experience as the result of profound contemplation.

Bajo el Sol Azul is presented as two cycles of seven images and in this way, Menchelli too comes full circle. Each image, through its imperfect curves and asymmetrical forms, reveals an experience captured in order to eventually be continued by others. Their multiplicity and the ever so subtle variations across repetitions amplifies each image’s own subjectivity, echoing the simple realization that a finished product is always still a work in progress.

— Asha Bukojemsky