SOFT PAINTING

Salvador Banda’s work is a focused, conscious exercise that seeks a sincerely pictorial expression. With the composure of his character in harmony with the brush—perfectly suited to traditional layered painting, with narrative figuration and iconography—Salvador reflects on the genre of Landscape. Through overlays of color and form, he conjures an alterity of time within the same space. Updating the gaze and understanding of the pictorial genre, in the current context he shapes a space that confronts both the urban landscape and landscape as detritus of modernity, where “the natural”—plants, soil, animals—appears…

How does one frame the pictorial reflection of a man in the early 21st century, when technology increasingly drives us toward the fast glance, the fleeting gaze, the accelerated consumption of images, a divided nature, and life rushing by among buses, streets, people, street vendors—all engulfed in capitalist noise?

Salvador grew up in the city of Querétaro and its surroundings, between the suburban environment and the concrete of the city; a couple of years ago, he moved to Mexico City.
During this residency in Mexico City at lagos | estudios y residencias, he has been able to manifest and solidify a long-standing latent concern: painting in space.

As a first approach to expanding the pictorial gesture, Salvador turns to textiles—chosen for their economic accessibility (every Friday, a secondhand clothing market sets up outside lagos) and the technical flexibility the material offers, an ideal condition for these first steps beyond the canvas. The result is a stimulating installation that translates his canvases into a walkable space. It maintains his figuration and his investigation into Landscape—which we can now expand to call environment, as he includes the human body by evoking it through clothing, which in some cases still retains the scent of its previous life. The result reveals an engaging and gentle rhetoric.

We are filled with emotion and a sense of fulfillment by Salvador’s boldness, through which he was able to alternate his time and space.

olgaMargarita dávila
Chief curator

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