By Alberto Campos

 

For this coming season of the Day of the Dead celebrations, Galería Manuk will be showing oil paintings of María Ayala in Restaurant La Doña.

 

At first glance María Ayala´s work talks about a lost everyday life, of a longing for an old San Miguel, the one that has slowly been disappearing, swollen by the city maelstrom. In this aspect, she shows scenes of a town that still lives with “open doors,” of a San Miguel which she herself calls the “deep San Miguel,” the place to which she arrived many years ago and has seen vanishing little by little, gobbled up by the seekers of “magic towns,” losing that very same magic which it possessed in the past. A town in which any direction one turns the eyes, one bumps into the cultural syncretism and miscegenation of religious icons covered by and symbols of a modern globalized world.

 

Her paintings are images of spliced remnants of time, forgotten scenarios in a universe who refuses to perish, lonely personages, dwellers who coexist in an isolated world of its own, petrified in time, as captive in another dimension; scraps of an everyday life hopelessly doomed to disappear.

 

In María´s works we enter a universe that is governed by its own laws, both physical and psychic. There is a subtle balance, difficult to detect since it breaks with the rigorous perspective of the world in which we live to give way to an ironic one. Beings trapped in an infinite loneliness, each making his own effort so that the moment that captured them remains in its peculiar equilibrium, which is dictated by a strange composition and a unique use of color that produce characters captive in an instant of time, in a remnant of life, which is left unresolved. Spaces subtracted from temporality, projecting a silent and subtle unreality. The internal energy of her paintings is a kind of organized chaos, of a balanced entropy.

 

In the most intimate aspect, the work of Mará Ayala tells us about a lost paradise, perhaps that of childhood, parallel worlds of superimposed dimensions that cause spatial tearing and vertigos of acid lights projected over ignored, denied, static objects settled in time to become invisible. The messy broom thrown in any corner, the punished tin rooster, objects cornered on light meters, defiant cables that populate the air, scattered toys in inconceivable places, absurd stairs, religious shrines accompanied by heresy. At the same time there are deserted spaces that speak to us of an absence, of an unbearable emptiness and nostalgia, of an unhealed past.

 

This exhibition will begin on Wednesday, October 27, with an opening cocktail from  6–9pm, at the Restaurant La Doña, in San Francisco 32. There will also be decorations of the Day of the Dead.