THE TREMOR OF ONE'S OWN VOICE: LAYERS OF YELLOW AND FOLDS IN THE AIR

During a one-month residency at LAGOS, Gabriela Sánchez has undergone an exponential expressive transformation, driven by a radical and conscious search for her own gesture. After many years devoted to painting practice, especially articulated around encaustic, conventional printmaking, monotype, and photography printed on various supports, her artistic voice had previously been circumscribed and dominated by technical rigor. The medium operated as a mandate: technique held primacy, along with an urgency to meet the perfection and the "should be" of the craft. On the level of political reflection, this technical submission found its mirror in the imperatives of the social "should be" historically imposed on Latin American women and, in particular, on Mexican women.

Determined to subvert this inertia, Sánchez arrived at the residency with a firm will to fracture that order, and so she places herself in the space of the blank studio and finds herself in the crack in the floor. Through rigorous discipline, she channeled into line an expansive search toward a deep, layered, and radically contemporary pictorial expression. Taking up transparencies again, a resource explored in earlier stages but now free of constraints and endowed with an expanded confidence, the artist found fertile ground nourished by the empathy of a fully supportive environment, inhabited by other women creators and artists.

Through continuous dialogue, gallery visits, and shared critical reflection, constantly questioning what lies beyond conventional materials and tools, she found in domestic utensils such as the broom, the squeegee, and the mop, used as large-scale brushes, the ultimate intentionality of being, thereby subverting the domestic space into the studio. Gabriela managed to distill a fascinating, compelling installation that is fully relevant to current painting practice. Her proposal dialogues with the spatial overflows of references such as Katharina Grosse, interweaving tones, folds, and material densities, as well as with the practice of Galia Eibenschultz, in which the body, gesture, and performative energy are rendered into a visuality. In this work, small and large expressions merge through superimposed layers of diverse materials to shape an unprecedented voice, a new vocabulary, and the certainty of her pictorial, plastic, technical, and emotional capacity.

olgaMargarita dávila

Chief Curator

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