FUEGO by Matías Solar, Andrew Birk, Allan Villavicencio, Mexico City

Fuego is a site of creation and promotion of contemporary painting in Mexico City, maneuvered by Matias Solar, Andrew Birk, and Allan Villavicencio.

In their namesake inaugural presentation, they exhibit three examples of work created in the space, all informed by the industrial context of the neighborhood (Colonia Tránsito).

Matías Solar plants an experimental pictorial search, using textiles commonly associated with flags and festive objects.

In this case, the folds and bubbles that the material itself generates in a washing process are captured by the application of spray paint, then manipulated in an almost automatic way, finishing as images with references to digital renders or science fiction.

The materialities are forced to speak of a daily social context of contrasts between precariousness and high technology.

Andrew Birk is actively looking for an assistant to drag him down the alley behind his studio, over the pot-holes and broken glass, over the semi-truck grease stains and polluted tire powder. This is how he is making his work at the moment, on denim. Other than his brain, his body is the tool that he is most interested in developing.

Allan Villavicencio displaces the question of where a painting begins and ends towards a broader issue of the production of space, considering how certain spaces are delimited inside urbanity. In this sense, his paintings make the delimitation strategies within the painting correlative to manners of demarcation of urban spaces. His practice can be thought of as an image and also as a material accumulation of pictorial gestures that build and direct what we see on the painting’s surface.