Sandra De León Torres

El Rito, El Fuego y La Serpiente


Galería Guadalajara 90210
Agosto 2023
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The minimal fraction of visible light that retains the surface of the burned wood: a dot, a letter or a series of lines that elevate themselves from the floor to the wall like extensions of an embossed shadow - vertebrate but standing tall -  expanding and absorbing all the white in its surroundings.

Working for a decade with the essential calligraphy allocates Sandra De León Torres in the exact spot where poems turn into ashes, residual fragments that are impossible to fit one into the other. A composition and representation where her sculptures and linen act their own absence, conjuring in all those forces that makes us  think of: Mathias Goeritz, Beatriz Zamora, Richard Serra, Anni Albers and the indispensable Pierre Soulages.

This ensemble exercise has something of the handcrafted manifesto. No les, no more. The hand dictates the limits of the linen and the vantablack wood, that only come into fruition when it has been consumed by ritual and memory and can only be understood in its contemplative distribution where only the absolutely necessary deserves to be real. It might be that the answer to all of these lays in the place that we are in this instant, the memory of a common past where the ritual, the fire and the serpent are not profane like judeo christianity proclaimed but on the contrary, they are a pure representation of sacred knowledge and patience.

Sandra De León Torres (Guatemala, 1985) is an artist that takes part of a dissident diaspora of discursive stings, her process is patient and informed, a deforested talent that is so necessary in these wide and unaffiliated poles of the world.

— Javier Payeras