Drawing, Constructing… An Intimate Dialogue:
Mónica Mayer and Victor Lerma
Exhibit statement
Featured Artists
Mónica Mayer and Victor Lerma.
Since the 1970's Mónica Mayer and Victor Lerma have been companions and partners in life and work. In 1989 they formed the group Pinto mi Raya (I Draw the Line), a platform from which they organized ‘’applied conceptual art’’ projects with the aim of ‘’lubricating the art system so that it functions better’’.
These projects take on different forms but always constitute critical interventions in their contexts that open up the possibility of different modes of thinking and action in relation to social dogmas and institutional inertias or vices and are characterized by a strong dose of humor and community solidarity, as well as a notable sense of self-criticism.
However, in parallel to their collective work, Mayer and Lerma have always continued their individual artistic production, which in many cases is less known than their collaborations, and in some instances has never been exhibited in public
venues. This is the case of many of the works included in this exhibition, which proposes a dialogue between the drawings and graphic works from Mayer ‘s ‘’Houses’’ series and the mixed media constructions by Lerma.
These works, that on the occasion of this exhibition were moved from the couple’s home, where they were created, to another domestic space, the home of John R. Thompson, also constitute subversive interventions.
In the case of Mayer's work, they play insistently with a symbolic vocabulary that translates into pictorial form a series of interpersonal and introspective tensions, questions, feelings and power relations, refusing as in all of the artist’s work to maintain the conventional division between the personal and the political.
In Lerma’s work, his delicate constructions not only subvert the horizons of expectation related to contemporary abstract sculpture, but also constitute idiosyncratic investigations that produce distinct experiences of everyday spaces and materials, inviting their exploration from new positions and awakening new corporeal, sensorial and perceptual potentialities.
The combination of these artists works in a different space also suggests new relations and dialogues, through which we hope to invite reflections and
conversations regarding the various forms of intimacy in life and art, and the power of affect and materiality in these two contexts, that for Mayer and Lerma are one.
Karen Cordero Reiman
2017
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© JOHN R. THOMPSON. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ALL THE ARTWORKS AND CURATOR'S STATEMENTS ARE PROPERTY OF THEIR AUTHORS.