Alejandro Echeverría shows the plastic feeling of Oaxaca

And plastic feeling This is what photographer Alejandro Echeverría (1958) seeks and captures on the walls of his hometown of Oaxaca. These walls are continually graffitied during demonstrations and marches, and then covered up by the authorities. This is when the trained eye of the photographer comes into action, in order to find new aesthetic compositions.

Echeverría has been focusing on the walls of Oaxaca for 30 years. Now he is showing a selection of the color works from the series Sutures of a city y Workspaces with the title of Wallsat the Almanac Gallery. The pieces were chosen by curator James Oles based on their relationship with painting.

For Oles, Echeverría’s photographs are ephemeral and accidental canvases, fields of sumptuous color that float comfortably between carefully observed facts and the world of imagination.

Over time, the main theme of the exhibitor has been social and political demonstrations; however, he does not take up the slogan, but censorship, what is coveredwhich in turn forms overlapping layers of paint. If his photos look like paintings at first glance, it is because “that is what exists on the wall. It is how I abstract it.”

“I’m an observer of the streets; I say: ‘there was already a march that the government took care of covering up’, then, I see that they left new compositions,” says Echeverría to The Day. Although he never thought about doing documentary photography, he feels that his material is a document of the different records of the demonstrations over three decades. Also, of the different types of paint used to cover them. It is an anthropological work on the walls.

–What kind of composition are you looking for?

–I try to express the textures, the lines, the compositions that are formed in what I call unconscious codes because in the end all these superimpositions create visual codes.

In my work, since it is a wall, there is almost no depth of field, which is sometimes due to the play of light and shadow. My images are mostly direct light, at the moment when the light hits the wall strongly. If the wall is in the morning, I work between 10 and 1 in the afternoon. But it can also be between 3 and 5 in the afternoon. It depends on the direction of the sun.His compositions tend to be abstract.

He prints his images on 310 gram cotton paper. He says that in the past he used to print a lot on glossy photographic paper, which had a lot of shine; however, with the advent of cotton papers, there is no shine anymore. It is not matte either, because the colours are vivid. The lack of shine contributes to his photographs looking like paintings.

Most people are indifferent to these walls. Many of the people who have seen my work, whether they are visiting Oaxaca or living here, have not seen the city from what I see. It changes their view completely because suddenly they pay attention to things that happen there..

Through the viewfinder of his camera, Echeverría abstracts what he wants to include in the photograph, although Always with that precise view on what I want to express, which is an artistic manifestation through the image. A language that I have generated in these 30 years, in which I have allowed myself to be part of a strong artistic movement. My principles were more linked to painters than to photographers..

The oldest piece in the exhibition, What the wind to Juarez (1996), is the only one that was not on a wall, but on a eucalyptus tree: On that tree was this remnant of the Benito Juárez poster, which I tore off to take the photo closer to my level.. According to Echeverría, the bark of the tree with the image of the Benemérito came into the hands of Francisco Toledo, who even He exhibited it as a piece of the month at the Museum of Modern Art in the late 1990s..

The exhibition Wallsby photographer Alejandro Echeverría, will remain until September 7 at the Almanaque gallery (Colima 101, Colonia Roma, CDMX).