Muros

From the invention of the medium in the 1830s, photography rivalled painting. It offered more direct reproduction of the observed world, and did so more quickly and economically. But it was also indebted to painting: early daguerreotypes and albumen landscapes followed conventions developed in the Renaissance. Eventually, however, photography influenced its rival, evident in the cropped subjects, asymmetrical compositions, and closeup views of so many modern paintings. In the twentieth century, abstraction in photography and painting developed hand-in-hand, to the point where it became easy to work in both (El Lissitzky, for example, or Ellsworth Kelly).

Alejandro Echeverría’s vibrant, crisply-focused images engage both pictorial traditions: they are inseparable from the histories of photography as well as painting. As documents recording specific walls—discovered as he wandered the streets of Oaxaca—they pertain to a long history of representation, especially in Mexico. Working in black and white in the 1920s, Edward Weston was entranced by pulquería murals; a few decades later, Aaron Siskind traveled across the country capturing abstract compositions—also in black-and-white—that recalled the work of painters like Franz Kline and Raymond Haines. And as soon as color film was available, artists set out to capture the nation’s brightly-tinted walls—from village facades to the elite architecture of Luis Barragán—to the point where the subject became almost a cliché in the history of Mexican photography.

Yet none of these artists approached the level of abstraction we see in Alejandro Echeverría’s photographs; a distillation of form seen mainly in the history of postwar painting: Josef Albers, Mark Rothko or Vicente Rojo. Over the past three decades he has consistently and carefully extracted the most compelling details from expansive and messy streetscapes, reminding us of the importance of the frame: he crops with his lens, not in the darkroom. Contextual elements—doors and windows, signs and other detritus—are absent, although some photographs include an occasional trace of graffiti. Instead, these works focus on painterly qualities, like brushstroke and gesture, texture and dripping, layers and silhouettes. Echeverría’s photographs are like ephemeral and accidental canvases, fields of color that hover comfortably, between carefully-observed facts and the world of the imagination.

— James Oles, curator.

Alejandro Echeverría (Oaxaca, Mexico. 1958). Self-taught, Echeverría has photographed the urban environment of the capital of Oaxaca for 30 years. With his abstract compositions that describe color, line and texture he has created three series: Sutures of a City, Paper Traces and Work Spaces.

Echeverría has participated in more than 60 exhibitions with solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca, Centro Cultural Santo Domingo, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Ateneo de Yucatán, Faro de Oriente, Casa Lamm, L'Entrepot Paris and Lux Art Gallery Tieste, Italy.

He participated in the major exhibition Mexichrome, color photography in Mexico, curated by the art historian James Oles Phd. at the Museum of the National Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City; Lu ́ Biaani, Francisco Toledo and photography, curated by Alejandro Castellanos, at the Colegio de San Ildefonso, Centro Cultural Cabañas, Guadalajara and Museo Amparo de Puebla.

His work has been published in specialized media, including México Desconocido and Tierra Adentro; Patricia Mendoza, Carlos Blas Galindo, Jorge Pech and James Oles, among others, have written about it and it belongs to the collections of the Institute of Graphic Arts of Oaxaca, Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca, Museum of Philately and Henestrosa Library, Museum of Painters Oaxacans in the city of Oaxaca, CDMX Historical Center Foundation and Mautner–Austin Foundation, Texas; amongst others.