La Jornada: Art is a constant speculation; things are not fixed: Ray Smith

San Miguel de Allende, Gto., The old walls of the La Aurora Factory left behind the roar of the looms decades ago.

This Saturday, another kind of movement took over the venue: bodies linked with animals, faces emerging from landscapes, birds with endless legs and figures reluctant to any classification populated the wine-colored walls of the Noyola Fernández gallery, where it was inaugurated The wild order, exhibition by Ray Smith, curated by Mario Llaca.

There was no mandatory starting point. Some visitors stopped before a grid of watercolors; others surrounded structures that altered circulation, while several looked up at a monumental piece.

“I’m just trying to see through the cracks of things and maybe be lucky enough to invent another language,” Smith said in an interview with The Day. “Art is an alternative to survival and constant speculation. Things are not fixed.”

This way of understanding painting also organizes the tour. Nearly five meters high, the structure inspired by an avocado tree emerged years ago in La Tallera, Cuernavaca, Morelos, and since then it has incorporated mirrors, layers of paint and new materials. It has even changed names at other facilities.

For Smith, the pieces are never completely finished. “I don’t know when a work is finished. Maybe none of it is.”

Build an experience

From the beginning, Mario Llaca opted for a different reading of the painter’s career.

“I didn’t want to make an exhibition that simply explained Ray Smith’s career; I wanted to build an experience. I was interested in finding the communicating vessels between works made at different times and showing that, behind this apparent irreverence, there is a deep coherence.”

An oil painting made two decades ago dialogues with another completed a few weeks ago; A drawing is extended into a sculpture and a screen rearranges the reading of a nearby watercolor. Affinities, tensions and resonances end up replacing any timeline.

“The title of the exhibition says it all. The idea is that they start wherever they want,” said the curator.

The 56 pieces include oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, sculptures and screens made with pyroxylin. Together they bring together different stages of Smith’s production without being tied to a timeline.

Before reaching the gallery, visitors visit artists’ studios, antique stores, textiles, jewelry, furniture, sculptures and objects of Mesoamerican inspiration. The old textile factory preserves a constant coming and going of creators, collectors, tourists and inhabitants of the city.

In this environment, Smith’s visual universe exceeds the limits of the room. His characters obey a different logic: heads extended until they become birds, bodies that share limbs with plants and animals, domestic objects endowed with life and landscapes with unstable borders.

Beyond pleasing

For Llaca, Ray Smith “does not seek to please; he provokes. His work questions, plays, makes people uncomfortable and breaks expectations.”

Smith takes this reflection one step further: “Perhaps what is wild is the order. We create order through human legends, but the universe does not care. So, where is the order really?”

The answer appears dispersed in hybrid creatures, impossible anatomies and scenes that seem to emerge directly from the line, the starting point of his entire production. “Since kindergarten, reality was mediated through drawings. If you can draw it, maybe it can exist.”

Smith (Brownsville, Texas, 1959) arrived in Mexico when he was just two months old. He grew up in the Mexican capital and stayed there until the 1985 earthquake, when the house where he lived with his wife was destroyed. After a period in New York, he established his studio in Cuernavaca, from where he alternates projects in both countries.

Visits to the National Museum of Anthropology, pre-Hispanic cultures and a pictorial tradition marked his training and ended up defining his language.

He also celebrated the moment that the country’s artistic creation is experiencing: “Mexico is breaking new ground. In architecture, cinema, painting and sculpture there is an extraordinary level. Here things are done with the heart. It is the artists and their communities who push all this.”

The inauguration began under intense sunshine. Towards the end, the sky suddenly changed and it started to rain. Water leaked through some points of the building, while more and more visitors entered the rooms to shelter from the downpour and continue their visit.

The exhibition The wild order It will remain open until October 15 at the Noyola Fernández gallery, located in the La Aurora Factory (calzada de La Aurora s/n, Zona Centro, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato). It can be visited from Monday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.