Disobedience: Matter as Subject

Reconsidering painting from its materiality is what Perla Mata Chairez proposes in her most recent work; she paints with post-industrial waste.

For years, Perla has been reflecting on and creating pieces that respond to the presence and damage of the “cerro negro”, a mound of waste from silver extraction, in La Laguna, Coahuila, her hometown.

In the 1990s, numerous cases of people affected by heavy metals emerged in Torreón and the rest of La Laguna. In response, the extraction industry made adjustments so that lead would no longer be present in this jale (waste mound), which, in the open air, stands as a landmark in the city’s landscape, since its height exceeds 30 meters. The black material that constitutes the hill is contained only by a wall around its perimeter, not its volume. For this reason, given La Laguna’s characteristic dust storms, it spreads throughout the region: a black dust that is released into and inhabits streets, homes, clothing, parks, and is breathed in by the inhabitants of the comarca.

This phenomenon of the “cerro negro” captivates Perla’s awareness and sensitivity, because of its color, its presence as a mark imprinted on the environment, its effects on the body, and its mobility through the radical freedom of the wind.

During her residency at Lagos, Perla has developed another format to manifest the black dust within her paintings: a disobedient performativity of pictorial presentation. On one hand, she softens the edges, liberating the work from its frame; on the other, in a gesture of tension, a stretched canvas is displaced and presented as worked on both sides. Finally, she positions the work horizontally, as a research table where, with a magnifying glass, we can closely observe the material’s behavior.

Captivated by the resistance of post-industrial dust to being contained, by its mobility, by how it spreads across the region, and by its “aliveness”, when used as pigment in painting, the dampened dust floats momentarily in the liquid and, once spread on the canvas, moves according to its own nature, hardly manipulated by the hand, Perla seeks fidelity, resonance, and situated knowledge with the material principle. She formulates three actions that involve painted canvases, space, and body. She provokes another disposition, different from the conventional, to approach the work; she allows us to reformulate the traditional pictorial format. She leads us on a path: to walk around the piece, to see it in its totality, front and back, and to bend down to observe in detail the particles and their beauty.

There is a reflective provocation between the Micro and the Macro, between the mechanisms of power that operate on identity and territory; especially in the video, which, in the form of a letter, Perla establishes a dialogue with the residue as a shared journey. With both emotion and distance, she provokes clarity. Like a play of subjectivities and declarations that rename, from the invisible everyday, the small dust, to what is embodied in art, matter itself as a subject of resistance.

olgaMargarita dávila 

Chief Curator

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