kurimanzutto展讯 | “Siembra”全年项目 - 罗伯托·吉尔·德·蒙蒂斯：格格不入

Siembra（播种）是一个开始于2020年2月的展览计划，并会根据当下境况持续延长。画廊空间被分成七个独立的房间，画廊代理及初次合作艺术家、团体和艺术项目将分别占据不同的房间，并在其中恣意表达。每个项目都是独立的，它们的时间跨度均由各自的创作过程所决定，而非强合给定的日期或预设的创作期限。它们碰撞出的巧合仿佛农业播种期一般相互交织。

Siembra将画廊打造成一个充满可能性的空间，一个时间和空间以不同的速度逐步、同时，并以不同的速度相联系的场域。在这里，交叉授粉、思想涵育和多样性的实验交相汇聚，以期创造收获。

即使你不在拉佩尼塔，水面也是横跨地平线的一道条纹。清晨的太阳呈现白色，圆滚滚的，放射出凛冽的蓝光，照耀着出海的渔船。鸟儿们在波涛间盘旋飞舞，秃鹫啄咬沙滩上的空啤酒瓶罐、消毒水瓶子、鱼骨头、鳗鱼和胀起来的鲀鱼。太阳挂在山峰之上，照耀着阿罗约河，在树梢间照耀出绿光然后落下，在渔船归港时为夜晚洒下一片橙红。

某些事情始终没有改变。黄色的热流在邮船的停机坪上轰鸣作响，模糊了周遭的空气，让汗珠顺着湿漉漉的背部不停滚落。尘土飞扬，噪声四起，到处都是打斗声、笑声，还有从车子和里间卧室还有鹈鹕等在门口的小酒馆里传出来的班达乐曲声。鸟儿们在枝头鸣叫，男人画上妆容。男孩子们在等待着男孩，也等待着你不还，人们在车里拥吻。孩子们也在那里，还有塑料桌子、椅子，门开着，还有狗、一匹站在卡车上的马、鬣蜥、手推车上的椰子和菠萝。桶里装满了盐碱土，想试着种一种玫瑰花。有时有水，有时没有水。

有些恶搞但又很严肃，目的性强烈但又并没有给出结论，罗伯托·吉尔·德·蒙蒂斯的绘画探索了他所见的肆意生长的日常生活里被隐藏的图像，和被遗忘或被想象出来的故事。画面中央的黑色印迹是一块空洞，或一颗鸡蛋，一片坟场，或一座舞池，一道台阶，也是一捧滴上了蜡烛、准备用来种植的泥土。画布是肥沃的田地，在其中作者重新排列了真实与虚幻之间的空间：人物的形象在抽象的表面上或漂浮，或横躺，在各自占据的空间里成为格格不入的探险者。

把音量调到不能更大，投入到一个想法之中，抵制暴力和憎恶的话语并拥抱直觉，追寻一种诱因直到检阅了其最生动的描摹，吉尔·德·蒙蒂斯通过这些方法来达成对神秘与不可言说事物的接近。而他的描绘则是混融了不协调与色彩的幻象，是混融了直觉与误解的幻象，对荒诞的忠诚和对谦卑的敬畏在其中以欺骗性的天真厘清并照亮了；当然，会有一位渔夫是维纳斯，还有一位坐在神殿的坟墓上阅读新闻的男孩。

如果我们选择去留意的话，象征性的负载充斥了当代生活。这些图像浓缩了历史，借鉴了前哥伦布时代与惠乔尔人的图腾，它们唤起了幻想与世俗的生活之间的交互，而这也是我们生命经验的特征所在。鹿在此处被猎杀，它们消失了，无声无息，而它们同时也是民俗彩饰里重要的装饰元素和肯定的解决方案。山羊是神圣的，它也是戴着面具，在长夜之后睡在人行道上的男人。面具，梦中的遭遇，聚会结束时的姿态性遗存，这些都是已被召唤出来的下一场未来的标志。

——露西·福斯特（Lucy Foster）

Even when you’re not in La Peñita the water is a stripe across the horizon. The sun is white and round in the morning, making cold blue light when fishing boats go out. Birds circle over waves and vultures peck at empty beer cans, cloro bottles, fish bones, water eels, swollen puffer fish in the sand. The sun hangs over the arroyo up the hill, making green light in the trees and falls over, spilling orange onto evening when the boats come back.

Some things are always the same. Yellow heat hums over the tarmac at the crucero, blurs the air, makes beads of sweat run down wet backs. There is dust and noise, fighting, laughing, banda music from cars and from inside bedrooms and the cantina where pelicans wait in the doorway. There is blood sometimes on the pavement. Birds squawk in the trees and men wear makeup. Boys wait for girls and wait for boys, people kiss in cars. Children are there too, plastic tables, chairs, doors open, dogs, a horse in the back of a pick-up, iguanas, coconuts in the wheelbarrow and pineapples. Buckets filled with salty earth to try and grow roses. Sometimes there is water, and other times there is no water.

Irreverent and serious, purposeful and inconclusive, Roberto Gil de Montes’ paintings explore the hidden images and forgotten or imagined stories of the exuberant everyday life that he sees. A black mark in the centre is a void, or an egg, a mass grave, or a dance floor, a stage, and also a veladoraflecked piece of earth for planting. The canvas is fertile terrain on which to realign the spaces between the real and the imaginary: figures float in abstraction or are laid across surfaces, misfits and explorers in their own habitat.

Gil de Montes approaches the mystifying and the unspeakable by turning up the volume as far as it will go and plunging into an idea, resisting discourses of violence and aversion in favor of intuition and pursuing a provocation all the way to its most vivid depiction. His is an imaginary of incongruity and color, of the instinctive and the misunderstood, where fidelity to the absurd and reverence for the humble clarify and illuminate with deceptive naïveté; of course a fisherman is Venus and a boy reads the news on a tumba in the panteón.

Symbolic charge pervades contemporary life if we choose to notice, and these images telescope history to draw on pre-Columbian and Huichol iconography and evoke the interplay between the fantastical and the mundane that characterizes so much of our experience. Here the venado are hunted, disappeared, voiceless, and they are also the celebrated adornments of folkloric illuminations and affirmative solutions. A goat is sacrificial and is also a man in a mask asleep on a pavement after a long night. Masks, oneiric encounters, the gestural remains at the end of the party that are also the signs of a next future already being conjured.

罗伯托·吉尔·德·蒙蒂斯1950出生于墨西哥瓜达拉哈拉。少年时代随家人迁居美国，而后在洛杉矶奥蒂斯艺术学院获得艺术学士和艺术硕士学位。当时还是年轻艺术家的他参与了洛杉矶及周边地区的奇卡诺艺术运动，并与卡洛斯·阿尔玛拉兹（Carlos Almaraz）等艺术家结识。在20世纪80年代，他返回墨西哥城，为现代艺术博物馆和探索拉美视觉文化的著名艺术杂志《视觉艺术》（Artes Visuales）工作。尔后罗伯托回到洛杉矶，专注于自己的绘画实践，并开始广泛展出作品。他还参与了LACE（Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions，洛杉矶当代艺术展览）的创建，并开始在Jan Baum画廊——当时唯一一家在西海岸展出黑人、拉美裔和亚洲艺术家的画廊展出。2000年，他与伴侣Eddie打包了他们在Echo Park的家，并经由究竟山，搬到了墨西哥纳亚里特州太平洋海岸的渔业小镇拉佩尼塔（La Peñita），他们曾于此度过很多假期。罗伯托之后一直住在拉佩尼塔，在一个直接俯瞰城镇广场的工作室里作画，离海岸只有一个街区。

吉尔·德·蒙蒂斯参与了许多个人和团体展览，包括了1980年代末在美国巡回展出的重要展览“美国的西语族裔艺术：三十位当代画家和雕塑家”。吉尔·德·蒙蒂斯后来还参与了ONE Archives组织、在洛杉矶当代艺术博物馆举办的展览“世界之轴：洛杉矶奇卡诺的酷儿网络”。这一展览是洛杉矶重要的城市活动“太平洋标准时间LA/LA”的一部分，图绘了20世纪60年代末至90年代末奇卡诺酷儿艺术家及他们的艺术合作者们之间的交集与协作。2017年，他的个人作品档案被南加州大学的ONE Archives宣布入藏。

此外，罗伯托·吉尔·德·蒙蒂斯的作品还被各类艺术机构收藏，包括：华盛顿特区史密森尼博物馆的国家肖像馆；洛杉矶县博物馆印刷部；加州长滩拉丁美洲艺术博物馆；墨西哥政府“大使馆中的艺术”计划；墨西哥瓦哈卡当代艺术博物馆以及亚利桑那州凤凰城的亚利桑那州立大学博物馆。

Roberto Gil de Montes was born in 1950 in Guadalajara, Mexico. As a teenager his family relocated to the United States where he later went on to receive a BFA and MFA from Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. As a young artist he became involved in the Chicano art movement in and around Los Angeles, developing relationships with artists such as Carlos Almaraz. In the 1980s, he returned to Mexico City where he worked at the Museo de Arte Moderno and on Artes Visuales, the prestigious arts journal that explored visual culture in Latin America. Roberto returned to Los Angeles to concentrate on his painting practice and began to exhibit widely. He also became involved in the creation of LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and began to show with Jan Baum Gallery, the only gallery at that time to show Black, Latinx and Asian artists on the West Coast. In 2000, he and his partner, Eddie, packed up their home in Echo Park and moved, via San Francisco, to La Peñita, a fishing town on the Pacific coast of Nayarit, Mexico, where they had spent many holidays. Roberto continues to live in La Peñita and paints in a studio directly overlooking the town plaza, a block from the coast.

Among many other solo and group exhibitions, Gil de Montes was included in the seminal Hispanic Art in the US: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors which toured the United States in the late 1980s. More recently, Gil de Montes featured as part of Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and organized by ONE Archives. The exhibition, framed in the important city-wide event Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, mapped the intersections and collaborations among a network of queer Chicano artists and their artistic collaborators from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. In 2017, his personal archival collection was acquired by ONE Archives, University of Southern California.

Roberto Gil de Montes’s work is part of various collections such as National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Museum Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum, Print department; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach California; Mexican Government, Art in Embassies; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico and The Arizona State University Museum Phoenix, Arizona.

“Siembra/播种”是kurimanzutto始创的展览计划。它希望每个展览都遵循自己的节奏，以此反映出强调生物多样性、生长节律的可渗透性、以及多样化种植的重要性之后，农作物的生长节奏。这些要素都是永续栽培——为了实现各方利益而尊重并明智地开发土壤——所必需的。本画廊中开展的这项试验，把参与到这个长期生态系统中每位艺术家创作过程的独特性，放在重中之重的位置上。

就像不同的物种共享同一片土地、同时又反过来滋养它，以此实现物种之间的互补一样，Siembra的各个展览共同栖居于画廊空间之中，对它们所塑造同时又居于其中的语境做出回应。Siembra展望一个生物多样而深具活力的景观。在此，不同的时间框架汇聚交融，并被各种观念、思想的多孔性所滋养，而不必期望某种预定的结果。画廊将被划分成7个各自独立而又相互关联的空间，加入项目的艺术家将在其中举办自己的展览。每个展览计划的周期都将由艺术家彼此的创作过程决定，并将共同创造各种纯乎偶然但又丰饶肥沃的精神连接。

Siembra is the project with which the gallery proposes an exhibition rhythm of its own, one that reflects the pace of the crop by emphasizing the biodiversity, permeability of periods of growth, and the importance of variety, all necessary in permaculture: the intelligent and respectful use of the soil for the benefit of all. The experiment in the gallery prioritizes the particularity of the creative processes of each of the artists participating in this long-term ecosystem.

Just as different species complement one another by sharing the same soil and nourishing it in return, the exhibitions within Siembra cohabit the gallery and respond to the context in which they are being developed. The project puts forth a biodiverse and vibrant landscape in which various timeframes converge and become nourished by the porosity of ideas, without the expectation of predetermined results. The gallery is divided into seven independent and interconnected spaces where individual exhibitions of the artists who will be joining the programming will be on display. Each artistic proposition will have a distinct duration depending on the artist’s process and will serve to create fortuitous and fertile mental connections.