Jorge de León uses the city as a starting point, a recurring theme in his work, which, despite its repetition, never fails to reveal something new. The drawings, objects, and constructions in this exhibition create a palpable tension between object and image, relying on materials with historical weight that make us question our imagined and constructed reality.
In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde creates the analogy of artists as tricksters, beings who play tricks on us.
"The Trickster knows how to slip through the pores, and how to block them, confusing polarities by twisting them into what conceals their traces and alters their meanings. He is polytropic, changing skin and shape according to what the situation requires."
— Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, p. 62
I want to propose that we view the series presented today without polarizing play and gravity, without judgment, and with the same raw attitude with which Jorge delivers it to us. Each series of blocks seeks and reveals something, allowing us to enter the city using the module as a starting point to understand Guatemala’s history, daily accumulation, destruction, and creation.
Jorge uses perspective as a way to hook us and to trick us. For a moment, we feel inside his drawings, and if we don’t think too much, the image plays with us and reveals that we are actually outside—or is it the other way around? Are we the observers or the observed? Are we those who belong or those who live on the margins of history? And to which history do we belong? To the tradition of oil painting, or are we collectors of discarded history, trying to patch together something new?
If we look at the raw materials in this exhibition, we see how Jorge’s sense of humor is revealed, and how, from his way of working with limited images and materials, a heavier reality emerges. In a way, the “blocks” exist in a simple manner, alluding to the most basic factor of construction. Through these industrial materials, yet not without social weight, each block overturns our references, articulates history, and transforms it into a malleable material, challenging and mocking both creator and viewer. The blocks generate and destroy simultaneously, presenting a generalized image of everyday life in Guatemala, while still pointing to the raw specificity in which we live. The accumulated module allows for construction—a repetitive act of block upon block—without necessarily giving us the moment to question what or with what materials these constructions are made.
We can see this exhibition as a walk with Jorge through Zone 1, revisiting his interests and themes, presented with the same nakedness and frankness that defines him. And why not see it that way, as it is a similar experience: a space where conversations oscillate between lightness and weight, between gravity and humor. Those steps weigh like concrete objects, but from a distance, there is a promising image that motivates us to keep moving with a pathetic yet optimistic innocence.
— Hellen Ascoli