Travesía Cuatro Gallery in Madrid presents the Nocturnos [Nocturnes] exhibition by the Mexican artist Jorge Méndez Blake, in which it's his third solo exhibition at this space. Méndez Blake continues his long-term research on literature and its impact on the visual arts.
On this occasion, the artist focuses his interest in the "nocturne", lyrical genre developed extensively in romanticism and modernism. In Spain and Latin America it was the reason for works by writers such as Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones, Federico García Lorca or José Asunción Silva; in Mexico, by the group of contemporaries, formed by writers such as Salvador Novo, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, José Gorostiza and Xavier Villaurrutia - who used it as the backbone of an essential book in the history of Mexican poetry of the twentieth century: Nostalgia for death.
Mendez Blake chooses this artwork to perform an exercise of poetic dissection. Among other poems, Nostalgia of Death includes seventeen nocturnes. These are poems about death, loneliness, night, desire, love, the forbidden, the void, the spiritual ... paradigms of the night genre and modern poetry.
The text of these seventeen nocturnes is analyzed by the artist to perform two work groups, following the tradition of concrete poetry: a series of four large format paintings, in which he uses each word (including punctuation) that compose them and a series of compositions made with typewriter on paper.
The nocturne is an intimate composition, but at the same time it is a discovery of the city at night, its solitary characters, forbidden shelter, it's the dark stage of the modern and surrealist writer. Méndez Blake also shows a project of a square, that could be the scene of a night, a space suspended between the dream and the desire.
On this occasion, the artist focuses his interest in the "nocturne", lyrical genre developed extensively in romanticism and modernism. In Spain and Latin America it was the reason for works by writers such as Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones, Federico García Lorca or José Asunción Silva; in Mexico, by the group of contemporaries, formed by writers such as Salvador Novo, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, José Gorostiza and Xavier Villaurrutia - who used it as the backbone of an essential book in the history of Mexican poetry of the twentieth century: Nostalgia for death.
Mendez Blake chooses this artwork to perform an exercise of poetic dissection. Among other poems, Nostalgia of Death includes seventeen nocturnes. These are poems about death, loneliness, night, desire, love, the forbidden, the void, the spiritual ... paradigms of the night genre and modern poetry.
The text of these seventeen nocturnes is analyzed by the artist to perform two work groups, following the tradition of concrete poetry: a series of four large format paintings, in which he uses each word (including punctuation) that compose them and a series of compositions made with typewriter on paper.
The nocturne is an intimate composition, but at the same time it is a discovery of the city at night, its solitary characters, forbidden shelter, it's the dark stage of the modern and surrealist writer. Méndez Blake also shows a project of a square, that could be the scene of a night, a space suspended between the dream and the desire.
