The title of the exhibition refers to two fundamental aspects of my practice. First, it speaks to my physical approach when painting: I always work facing the canvas, with my arm at a 90-degree angle to my body, keeping my gaze fixed on the surface I'm working on. Second, it relates to constructing the images, where the depicted bodies, objects, and elements are also seen frontally. This frontal view eliminates diagonals and vanishing points, which is essential to my work, as it situates painting within a Cézannian logic, where space is not built through depth, but through surface. -Joaquín Reyes
Public Rituals, Private Mysteries
Mystery seems to dwell within Joaquín Reyes’ work. Alone, in groups, or in small crowds, the beings he paints perform nearly incomprehensible rituals. When everyday elements do appear, as in “In My First Drawings,” they avoid naturalism in favor of a treatment that privileges formal relationships over narrative coherence. This consistent focus on color and form, rather than the logic of a story, any story, creates a sense of estrangement that is common across the painter’s recent work.
We see figures gathered, yet they rarely interact directly. They share a kind of collective muteness, and their bodies resemble cocoons decorated with textures or geometric patterns. Arms—hidden or absent—sink them into concentrated inaction. They are both characters and roadside shrines; spirits or people. It’s hardly accidental, then, that some appear to levitate among the crowd, or that a group might gather around a dead person while a faceless man holds a club.
The characters saturate the space, and their bodies sometimes reveal traces of previous paintings. It's as if the artist produces an instant palimpsest, layering image upon image—and ultimately, story upon story—through his pictorial process, enriching the surface and the relationships each scene suggests. They could be fragments from an experimental psychological novel, one that unfolds only in the narrator’s mind rather than the real world. More Beckett than García Márquez, though deceptively anecdotal or even magical-realist.
In his poetics, Reyes combines, on one hand, the irreverence and spontaneity of expressionists of all generations, and on the other, the analytical rigor of minimalists. A set of self-imposed rules and constraints shapes the scenes we observe, as seen in Sol LeWitt's planning of his wall drawings, but here with characters and settings—a theater where the scenographer, not the playwright, sets the rules.
Far from the narrative emphasis typical of artists his age and younger, Reyes is more concerned with process. Yet, unlike most process-driven artists, his work is not abstract. There are no accumulations of repeated elements, no absence of figuration. On the contrary, there are characters, unsettling scenes, and color. But there are also elements included to add a specific tone or necessary form. Repetition appears, too, in the form of geometries or patterns, driven by an abstract intent. Everything, in the end, seems like a pretext for a painting that delivers a disconcerting narrative result, perhaps because of the very conditions of its making.
At times, in those gatherings that Reyes loves to paint, a character cuts across the composition, seemingly levitating. This might be a strange, magical ceremony, a manifestation conjured by the magnetic will of the gathered. It's impossible to say. But also—and more likely—it’s simply the need to insert a horizontal element in a vertical composition that the artist felt compelled to break. In this way, narrative arises from plastic needs. This is nothing new: since the beginning of Western painting, artists have organized their compositions under the same impulse, even when depicting the suffering of Christ or the glory of battle.
However, in Reyes’ case—where the story emerges as he paints, from the interplay of layers—it’s more evident, more radical. He paints things he knows will be partially erased. He creates provocations that force him to act in unforeseen but necessary directions. He fabricates his destiny, if we’re allowed the metaphor.
Perhaps, unintentionally, his work illustrates the inevitable fate of the subject in society. Our destinies often seem to be conditioned by a set of rules, restrictions, or patterns that we’re forced to endure. We can rebel, protest in public or private, or embrace them wholeheartedly. What we can’t do is escape them.
The list of imperatives will vary depending on our personal and political convictions, but it’s a fact that social life—on any scale—asks us to share a set of mandates. Reyes, with the stencils he uses to draw faces and the patterns he applies to bodies that resemble larvae, may be painting just that. Perhaps that’s why his characters almost always seem silent, resigned. The ritual they enact—with muffled music and mysterious harmony—is the ritual of a life whose meaning we might discover while we watch.
César Gabler, Visual artist
April, 2025
