Recovering the Hand for Oil Painting

Under the premise of "five decades of painting," this Open Studio sustains the research and production that Berta Kolteniuk presents as the result of a residency conceived as a territory of liberation and reconnection. Over the course of fifty years, her trajectory of inquiry has moved with rigor, curiosity, and constant experimentation through figuration, abstraction, expanded painting, textile work, monochrome, and pictorial materiality in volume—always in search of contemporaneity.

All of these directions mark not only an inquiry rooted in idea, technique, subject matter, and form, but also a stance of resistance and a profound political act. In the 1990s, particularly in Mexico City, pictorial practice—and markedly the work of women artists—was pushed aside by the rise of conceptual art. Sustaining painting in that context meant defending a language of one's own from the margins of dominant trends, while always maintaining a posture attuned to the present moment. Unlike other colleagues who held onto a modern pictorial position, and others who, unable to understand or take part in the distribution and visibility circuits that delegitimized their practice, fell into depression, Berta did not. She built herself a trench in which to hold the attitude of an emerging artist—that was her strategy. One that, at times, worked against her.

In this residency, Berta has managed to dismantle the dogmas of a restrictive contemporaneity that she explored for decades, in order to reconnect with a loose, autonomous, and vital painting: full of pleasure. This process has also meant a technical and physical reencounter: recovering brushes as her primary expressive tool. While her earlier stages were dominated by acrylic, spills, and material resources, this new cycle marks a conscious return to the tradition of oil painting. But not from orthodoxy—rather, as an act of reflective disarmament, a deliberate move to open up the discipline, both in its historical and institutional narrative, to reveal the seams, mechanisms, and ideologies that tend to remain hidden behind the finished product.

By returning to this tradition and dismantling it from its historical hegemony, her current pictorial practice moves away from the imperative obedience of accelerated production, entering into dialogue with the philosophical proposal of deceleration put forward by Byung-Chul Han. Relearning the craft, retraining the hand, and reconciling with glazing, gesture, and the continuity of the brushstroke are the axes structuring the seven pieces that make up this exhibition, recovering—within lived time—pause, contemplation, and a slow temporality set against the ephemeral consumption of images.

The works gathered in this space demonstrate a constant back-and-forth between "classical" painting and expanded painting, materialized through different technical solutions: Gestures and spills, in which, in some pieces, Berta combines the fluidity of turpentine-based spills with the structure of strokes made with brush, and the use of a dropper. In the two largest-scale pieces, Large Format, Berta commits to the power and breadth of direct brushwork. Within this pair, the most peculiar and turbulent piece of the set can be seen in the work Polen, in which gesture, both subtle and rough blurred glazing, cut-out-style delimited areas with formal contours, and a central black figure with tight, traditionally rendered brushwork all converge. This convergence of pictorial languages seeks a mature exploration of the craft of painting on canvas, where the artist not only recovers oil painting but also reconciles and recontextualizes it with her history, her corporeality, and her creative present.

olgaMargarita dávila

Chief Curator

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