Abrupt Landscape

Esteban Leñero, Abrupt Landscape Born and raised in Michoacán, Esteban Leñero spent his childhood surrounded by craft: with clay pots and blown-glass stemware, ludic figurines and somber religious paintings. Like other artists who’ve engaged seriously with arte popular (think: Francisco Toledo or Chucho Reyes in Mexico, Stuart Davis in the United States, and especially Alfredo Volpi in Brazil), Leñero is interested in repetition and serialization, in ecstatic color and frontal forms, in the syncopated rhythms, material transformations and mischievous distillations that animate the work of the artisans with whom he’s collaborated intimately through the years. Craft has often been romanticized as a timeless emanation of Mexico’s pre-Columbian past, a reductive view of a backward rural world providing folkloric succor to the city. Leñero rejects these view. He is fundamentally a craftsperson, with painting as his oficio and, in his paintings, he responds, like his fellow artisans, with vigor and creativity to the sudden transformations that have reshaped the world around him: the Abrupt Landscape that lend this, his second solo exhibition, its name. Since his childhood in the 1990s, illegal deforestation has peeled back pine forests and replaced them with avocado groves and berry crops have turned open fields into rippling seas of white polyethelene. In Jalisco, the metastatic expansion of Guadalajara’s urban footprint has engulfed Tonalá, devastating traditional clay mines, particularly those used to extract the mauve- and sage-toned pigments used to decorate barro canelo. Throughout his paintings, these images, more suggestive than literal, flash to the surface with the flattened urgency of slip figures on earthenware vessels. Billows of white, blue and yellow pigment rise between flower vases like an inverted festoon curtain; is it incense, or an unseen disaster, just out of frame? Church spires slice through orange flames and a pall of black smoke, like a comic-book apocalypse — or, perhaps, a pyrotechnic village festival. In larger canvases, the geometric crestings of village houses are isolated and layered, like the receding ridges of volcanic cones, in horizontal fields that stubbornly refuse perspective. For one of the show’s most evocative works, Leñero fabricated a metal grill, or reja, with a smith in Michoacan, its surface fragmented into a tangram representation of an imploding church. (Leñero has a profound and lasting affection for the sacral ephemera of Catholicism.) Both quotidian and beautiful — hallmarks of craft — it speaks to the impermanence of Mexico’s most stalwart institutions and, more subtly, to the detritus of public paranoia encrusted over every ground floor window in the country. Abrupt Landscape is neither a denunciation nor call to arms. It is, instead, a living map of flux, an insistent engagement with the present where all of us, for better or for worse, must live.