Indeed, to spend time in the room is to recognize the circular, yet expanding, compulsion. Stick figures populated a number of the works, as did simplified silhouettes of fishes, boats, clocks, bricks, roses, and frogs. His mapping was obsessive and obstinate, seeming to explode throughout the space in bright-and not always pleasant-contrasts of colors and shapes. Where Barajas used repetition and sharp close-ups to denaturalize the landscape, Chaves went all-out, adopting maximalism in an attempt to capture total experience. In an echo of Barajas’s dreamworld excess, Ramiro Chaves-an Argentinian artist well-known on the local scene for his photography-also took a major detour in his practice with “Escuela de Pescados”, a show of paintings, sculptures, and drawings at Agustina Ferreyra. Taken together, Barajas’s images felt visually intimate, the dreaminess of a past rendered fuzzy by its constant turning in our minds, snapshots of cherished memories hyper-stylized by our hearts and brains. These display the advances in his acrylic and airbrush technique. Barajas didn’t forgo the excess of “Mnemósine” altogether, however, hanging sixteen large, portrait-mode canvases in a neat row. In Aguacero Viscoso (2023), a shallow stream roils over rocks to create uncanny, almost bodily forms, while a neon-orange spot in a corner resembles an accidental thumbprint on a developing Polaroid. In Baba (2023), an elongated channel of water arches over shadowy cumulus clouds: a strange suspension. The resulting images are beautiful and implausible. That show was a preparatory sketch, of sorts, for “Saliva.” In this tighter-and more impressive-body of work, Barajas magnified his experiments with landscape painting, and turned them inward. Earlier this year, however, for “Mnemósine” at Proyectos Multipropósito, Barajas replaced the ceiling tiles in a massive office space with tile-sized, loosely landscape paintings showing clouds, sunsets, dice, car rims, and hair (among other things) in reconfigurations of his earlier, CGI-oriented work. Barajas’s practice to date has dabbled in post-internet aesthetics, creating loosely rendered CGI images of diamonds and currency falling from the sky. One such example was José Eduardo Barajas’s “Saliva,” his debut solo show at PEANA. This approach to painting could even be broadly described as a form of disengagement or retreat: a movement inwards, embracing dreams and memories. But much of it felt quite unexpected in its deviation from recent attachments to the colorful and the figurative, and notably more mature than the pop-culture fixations that have crowded the city’s galleries of late. This fall’s openings, however, set a more introspective and meditative-and perhaps not as obviously market-driven-pace. Mexico City’s cycle of exhibitions often feels like a hamster wheel that never stops turning.
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