Exhibition of the work of master artist Enrique Guillén Sánez. Oil paintings on canvas, presented with great talent and color. His work stems from questioning the human condition and observing nature. Interested in the notion of space and the idea of movement in painting, he works with figuration from a perspective influenced by the dynamism of Abstract Expressionism and the balance of Zen painting. The social aspect is the central axis of his work, addressing themes such as migration, poverty, armed conflict, and everyday life in today's society. Through this, he seeks to reflect on the course of humanity and the consequences of its actions, while remaining outside of moral issues. He graduated in Visual Arts from the University of Guadalajara in 2015, but owes his painting education to Masters José Ignacio Maldonado and Margarette Dawit, who took him under their wing in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, between 2001 and 2003. For a long time, from the beginning of my training until just a few years ago, I tried to stay within the limits of "reality." Nothing in painting that wasn't believable interested me. Contact with literature helped me loosen the knots that tied me to that solid and heavy world in which I found myself trapped. I cannot, nor do I want to, deny my love for painting, which is born from the deep observation of "solid reality," as it has helped me understand form, space, and matter, hence my fondness for still life and natural landscapes. However, on this occasion, I allowed myself to play a little with my imagination to construct stories and reconstruct memories in a more relaxed manner, freeing myself from the formal burden of "serious painting" by including a lot of drawing and colors that I wouldn't have allowed myself to do before. I wanted to accompany the exhibition with sketches, color tests, and notes on several paintings to share part of the work process and show the importance of drawing in my painting, as it is the primary tool with which I ground ideas, with which I can change the mental world, break it down, and put it back together as I understand it. Drawing is thinking; it is a language that contains no words, but rather fabrics of lines and stains: graphite warps containing the world. The pieces you are about to see draw on two sources: literature, on the one hand, and social issues, on the other. It is not my intention to discuss specific social events, but rather I use them to consider questions of existence more closely related to human feeling. Issues such as forced disappearance, migration, poverty, and childhood are addressed with the intention of serving as a reminder that there are topics we must not forget. The truthfulness of these stories lies in the fact that their memory awakens sensations in me that I tried to capture pictorially. The important thing is there, in the sensation they might evoke, not in the accuracy of the facts or the perfect description of the forms. Enrique Guillén Sáenz. San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, 2024
