Andre Toral

In “Travel Report,” an exhibition opening this Saturday, June 14, at Graphias, André Toral brings together a diverse set of works produced from a concrete – and symbolic – encounter with Mexico. Combining strategies of visual reporting, iconographic mining, and superimposition of stereotypes stemming from collective memory, the artist establishes a diffuse panel, superimposes distinct historical periods, and explores a wide range of compositional and technical experiments. As in a memory game, or in the logic of a puzzle, the viewer finds himself faced with a kind of visual riddle. 

Toral not only associates different icons (such as an indigenous woman with her back turned, wearing a traditional costume and hairstyle, beings from Mexican mythology, fragments of the country's colonial architecture, masked fighters who look more like superheroes, or the unfailing cactus landscape), but also shifts them from one context to another. The same symbol moves from work to work, wanders through different media, maintaining an aura of mystery and giving rise to a profound formal experimentation, which draws its main elements from comics and engraving (the artist's two main activities).

To compose what he calls “his travel report,” all his weapons seem to have been summoned, in an interesting amalgam of techniques and references, creating a continuous but disparate flow of images. Aquatint, etching, preparatory drawings, watercolors on “ghost impressions” (obtained without reinking the matrix, capturing only the subtle marks of previous impressions), added to a still recent adventure in the field of painting (represented by four oil canvases) make up this sedimentation of image memory of a culture that we can only approach from the edges, purposefully letting much slip through our fingers. In Toral’s words, it is a universe to be taken as a reference, a motif chosen to, “like a collage,” elaborate “a kind of ethnography of the imaginary, personal and collective, imprecise and at the same time based on sources, contradictory and ordered like dreams and memories.” 


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