Cartografia del riflesso

Contreras’s paintings evoke a state of suspension deeply connected to the term lagoon, which identifies the territories that emerge from the water and yet depend on it. Lagoon does not simply express a natural environment, but an existential condition: inhabiting the boundary between solidity and liquefaction, between root and migration.

 

Oscar Contreras Rojas’s artistic research is rooted in the themes of spatiality and landscape representation. The artist does not limit himself to a simple description of nature but, through abstract elements, creates a space in which dimensions merge.

In this solo exhibition, he presents artworks that recall both the Lagoon of Venice, the city where he trained and to which he feels deep ties, and his homeland, Mexico City. The two cities, with their surrounding environments, share a deep aquatic memory: both founded on lagoons and developed thanks to their close connection to their waters.

Places are not represented descriptively, but are rather captured in their interior dimension. Water becomes a perceptive and symbolic device: what it reflects is never identical to what appears. The reflection tilts, fragments, and transforms. The surfaces thus suggest an unstable cartography — a map that does not orient, but disorients — in which the visitors are asked to recognise themselves as a transitory presence, as an image that emerges and dissolves.