kurimanzutto展讯 | 罗伯托·吉尔·德·蒙蒂斯 - 水

罗伯托·吉尔·德·蒙蒂斯

水

kurimanzutto out east

8月11日-22日，2021年

installation view, roberto gil de montes, the water,

kurimanzutto out east, new york city, 2021

installation view, roberto gil de montes, the water,

kurimanzutto out east, new york city, 2021

installation view, roberto gil de montes, the water,

kurimanzutto out east, new york city, 2021

installation view, roberto gil de montes, the water,

kurimanzutto out east, new york city, 2021

installation view, roberto gil de montes, the water,

kurimanzutto out east, new york city, 2021

The island. A hat for the ocean, a magnet for the eyes. The island is small when illuminated by a single ray of the sun, but for the journeying iguana and the red crab it stretches out, enormous, its curved summit insinuating eternity. The beach. On the sand they gather and cavort, and the the island looks down at them, waiting for answers. They move in silence, crawl haphazardly up the shore, disappear again into water, search for their reflections in covered, hidden places. The water. Fish and nets, boats and bottles, whales, turtles, trees and swimmers all disturb its surface, but the water diligently tries to swallow the island. When clouds interfere or the sun dips down, the colors of water fracture and send their confusion up into the sky.

Glistening Huachinango, bodies ankle-deep, a heron, a Chac Mool in shadow. With ludic precision, and the provocative placement of figures in or on a landscape, in relation to, or oblivious of their animate and inanimate companions, Roberto Gil de Montes recuperates the poetic moment. The moment, dream-like, in which perception briefly overcomes simultaneity, abstraction and disorder to embody material forms who move and take shape before they dissolve again. The island is often present even when not visibly represented, a mirror for anyone who observes it, the measure of a person’s embodiment and their existence. Shells, here, are protective, ornamental features that evoke transformation and emergence. Rocks, like the island, are immobile and enduring elements that interpose themselves against the vigor and transient temporality of fleshly bodies and their changing positions.

The beach is a site of incipience and also of denouement, a place where false starts and stumbles encounter the inevitable winding down towards a stillness that is never completely at rest. On the beach, in front of the island, there is metamorphic communication between the lapidary, the carnal, the aquatic and the avian, a proliferation of forms and habitats. It is a playground for movement and exploration, the mixings and transfigurations that see creatures crawl out of shells, lose and acquire limbs, reveal or conceal themselves, writhe about and also stay still.

In these paintings the water absorbs while also bestowing treasures; its surface at once reflects and confounds the depth beneath opaque, variegated surfaces. Bodies, partially obscured or losing their specificity, are submerged, upturned, carried, or hidden by the water or the edge of the canvas, dipping into and out of visibility. Roberto Gil de Montes tests and challenges perceptions of background and foreground, an enveloping blue and green landscape that invites us to see the successive layers of narrative overlaid on a single, idiosyncratic setting. The sea engulfs but also delivers and surrenders its fish and its stories for the extraction of the figures that populate this landscape in a visual idiom of color, receptivity and interaction. With the translucent layering of elements across surfaces and across figures – the veil, the moving shoreline, the water itself – the artist reinstates an equivocation to the oneiric lucidity of some of the scenes, adhering with characteristic fidelity to a reverence for that which remains indeterminate, spontaneous, partial or unspoken. Is a rescue just another form of capture? And in embracing visible forms of ambiguity - wearing a mask, standing in water, hanging upside down or posing behind a veil - do we, in fact, offer up the most explicit renditions of ourselves?

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.