"The Persistent Insistence of Play" Casa Equis, Mexico City, 2019
The Persitent Insistence of Play
Curated by Leslie Moody Castro
Casa Equis, Mexico City, March 2019
Photography: Ramiro Chaves
How does a painting play in the space that it lives? How does it dance? We assume that a painting is static, that it lives on the white wall and is absolved of movement. We also assume that the space in which it is housed is absolved of history, or reference, and the painting inside the space is a simple, passive piece, never to have a second life beyond its current stretchers or at times, its current wall. Ultimately, we assume that a painting will always live the same singular life it was given when it was finished.
Othiana Roffiel challenges this notion of stagnation. The paintings have been given a second life, worked and reworked until they have begun to dance with one another in the space. Each brushstroke is a careful and balanced choreography of revealing and concealing, and as each painting enters the space it sets the foundation for a new, fresh conversation, an insistence of playfulness. Othiana’s experimentation means that no painting is ever completely finished, and as her brushstrokes have created a language on the canvas, she begins to cut away at that same language, offering a different translation of the very same gestures.
The works then enter the idiom of site specificity, an insistence and persistence of experimentation of language, movement, and a dialect of painting as the space both allows and permits. It is a playful act of mediation between the language of painting and the space it lives in.
Leslie Moody Castro