CRISTÓBAL ASCENCIO, AT THE CULTURAL INSTITUTE OF MEXICO IN SPAIN
The Cultural Institute of Mexico in Spain hosts the exhibition Estrategias de recuperación (Recovery Strategies), featuring three recent projects by the photographer. Including the series Las flores mueren dos veces (Flowers Die Twice, 2021–2024), Palimpsesto (2024–2025), and Maíz (Corn) (2023–present), the Mexican photographer explores the elements and causes that create distortion and fragmentation in memory.
In these compendiums, the images that make up these series inherently conceal processes of reinterpretation, forgetting, and selection in memory. They directly allude to the metaphorical fragility of the visual. Ascencio’s photographs can be seen as containers, spaces where these representations and interventions emerge throughout this journey. The result captures a moment—a precise instant that is also subject to subjective interpretation.
Las flores mueren dos veces draws on the artist’s personal experience and his relationship with his father to weave together a series of perceived memories. These memories serve as the core of that recollection and its distortion—sometimes intentional, sometimes not—and their materialization through specific mechanics and techniques that incorporate technology. Before the display of images, a box filled with real soil acts as the only almost-reliable testimony of the real framework that gives rise to interpretations.
Maíz embraces a documentary approach with a scientific and even empirical nature. Without abandoning photography, this series aims to provide an exhaustive documentation of the anthropology surrounding corn, the cereal that serves as the focal point of the study carried out by the author together with Alba Serra (Barcelona, Spain, 1984). It also offers insights into how this documentary action is reflected.
Palimpsesto, on the other hand, takes the myth of Penelope as its starting point. By reproducing the pattern of weaving and undoing, taking up and embroidering, Ascencio revisits the processes of time and memory, but above all, the deconstruction of the image and of the past in the present. The rendering on canvases of the results of these temporal and technical interventions in his work of recording the real-life settings of the myth also highlights the evolution and technical refinement of both the process and the artist.
The relevance of the creative process lies in the details and marks that emerge from its essence and construction, revealing the transparency with which it develops. In this way, they also serve as a record of the process itself, of the decisions that have shaped their visual form. The radical documentary approach that Dea Lopez, curator of the exhibition, refers to emphasizes the importance of execution—a surface-level vision that reflects an act and a procedure that underlie as a fundamental substratum and, in a way, invite the viewer to reflect on the veracity of the image.
Cristóbal Ascencio: Estrategias de recuperación is on view until April 23 at the Cultural Institute of Mexico in Spain, San Jerónimo 46, Madrid.
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