Three perfectly square and thin frames from José León Cerrillo’s (b. 1976, San Luis Potosí/Mexico City) series Subtraction Screens are seizing Gallery 4. Placed at distinctive angles, at times they are freestanding, at others they recline onto the vertices of the walls. The solid frames share formal affinities with Donald Judd’s Marfa concrete sculptures, Fred Sandback’s Sculptural Studies, and a long tradition of Mexican modernism from architecture to graphic design. Going back further, there is a direct correlation to the Russian avant-garde of the early-20th century and Suprematist compositions. The frames also literally do what the word says – they frame the space, other works, and the visitors.
For Cerrillo every abstracted symbol is a mode of communication. Interested in using language as a starting point and drawing from graphic ideologies, linguistic systems, and geometric abstraction, he explores and deconstructs the possibilities of pure abstraction through a wide range of media, and by doing so, he has started to develop a new alphabet. He uses the visual language of sculpture, installation, performance, and elements from graphic design. The work may take on large-scale, freestanding geometric forms, as seen with the Subtraction Screens. Yet he also uses more fragile, scaled-down materials, as seen with his use of glass, concrete, and plaster; in this arena many are referred to as “poems.” These exist somewhere between diagrams, drawings, and patterns, using letters, symbols, and numbers as an anatomy of content. This logic is applied as a reusable graphic system that is combined differently each time, allowing for mutable formats and media but always pointing to, or making manifest, the possibilities of meaning through repetition: the jolly jolt of interpretation as form.
Two-dimensional works are also of importance, and further emphasize Cerrillo’s interest in the codification of abstraction. Endlessly unresolvable, the graphical propositions he develops “point at larger ideological traps that are ever present and invisible in language: the formation of meaning through repetition, and repetition thus as a system of meaning.” JV
self-presentation:
It could begin with one saying One instead of, or in the place of I, if in this place I stand or begin to be as one saying One for I. One thinking of placing what oneness one can in a place where one could begin by saying what could be said if One was said for I. So it could be that the beginning was in the first place a way of ending, a way of saying how it could be if beginning would be to begin with a way of ending, and in second place, beginning as an end was a place from where to begin thinking of a way for a third. Place one instead of I and begin to think from where this I as One can speak and say I say One for I.
