Máx Gómez Canle

The links among the works multiply in this extraordinary sensorial space. In the artist’s words, it is “a chamber with many open windows, passages that bring fluids from distant places dragging thoughts of intimate corners, liquids that form part of a whole interconnected system. (…) Paintings, images that are within us, of painting on painting, eroded and re painted at every moment, for thousands of years”.
Memory of memories, the assemblage speaks as much of the formal refinement of the artist as of his knowledge of the history of art. “I work decidedly and without concealments resting on my ancestors”, Gómez Canle points out. In this exhibition the artist guards a lineage that includes the German Romantics, a Caspar David Friedrich, whose trail presides over Gómez Canle’s allusions to Raúl Loza, to Roberto Aizenberg. Small and medium-sized, the pieces exhibited evidence similarities and parallels with the works of the masters, re-elaborating from his subjectivity and with intelligence subjects or searches of the same.
The exhibition includes paintings of dramatic marine and mountain landscapes, magnificent skies, images of the digital universe (with geometric forms and caricature faces surprisingly installed in the landscapes) and a series of objects originating in Gómez Canle’s paintings, in which quotations of the above mentioned artists are slid and spilled. In some instances, the plain and volumetric or faceted geometries that Aizenberg painted are here turned into objects of polished metal. They are straight pyramids, whose lateral faces are isosceles triangles, reclined on velvety pedestals, in whose octagonal bases the artist painted beautiful landscapes with a supernatural ultraviolet light. “We live and think between walls. Have we ever been mental without them? We are used to piercing and also to adding things to them, images”, reflects the artist, who executes empty engraved forms that penetrate the white gallery wall mirrored with the two faceted objects of strong presence.
In one of his largest works, Gómez Canle paints illusory views within the outline of the habitual irregular forms, on a color plane, of Lozza’s concrete painting. The colored field that Lozza used to employ, here with fragments of the landscape, is replaced by the same soft cloth utilized for the faceted objects that refer to Aizenberg. Material and intellectual superimpositions, the concrete forms of Lozza’s paintings turn into three-dimensional metallic objects incrusted like arrows in several of Gómez Canle’s paintings, which with their renewed chimeras lovingly deny the master creator of the “Structural theory of color”.
Through the name of the show, Chambre Mentale, and of the pieces in French, maybe Gómez Canle remembers his Paris-born grandfather, the first pencils (Caran D’Ache) and the first books of art (in French) that he owned.