Tiene Sentido: Vasty Ramirez, Roberto Mendiola Cruz, Adolfo Guerra, and Alejandro Figueroa

Tiene Sentido brings together four artists working in a range of media—mixed media, photography, and prints—for a unique pop-up exhibition in which each artist is given a dedicated exhibition space. In this way we let their work envelop your complete field of vision, allowing you to immerse yourself not only in the pieces on display but also their process of production. Here, artistic labor and its products become sensory—the smell of flowers, the taste of produce, the feeling of prints and paint layered on a surface, the sound of the camera shutter, of the printing press, of paint being swept onto a canvas. 

Taste and smell are articulated by the vibrant tableaus created by Vasty Ramirez. The depth of color, pristine curvature of natural forms, and sharp contrast throughout the photos betray their one-dimensionality—viewers are inclined to lean forward and smell the flowers, to bite into a piece of fruit, to let the aromas and flavors permeate their bodies. 

Roberto Mendiola Cruz’s small-scale prints encourage close-looking. The intimate scale of the works draws you in, begging you to see something familiar, though what you might find is something estranged. In Mendiola Cruz’s prints, the body gives way to organic lines, turning the natural form into something abstract.  

Beyond the use of intense colors and tones, Adolfo Guerra’s mixed media technique creates a corporeal draw to his works, creating zones for meditation where you can lose yourself in a word, a rip, a logo, an image, a shape. The centering of parts of the body, of faces, places, and textures tempt the viewer to reach out and touch the surface, and to let that touch transport you inward to a place of reflection. 

The figures represented in Alejandro Figueroa’s Los Xinacates series take on a three-dimensionality that tricks the eye into thinking they might just leap off of the paper and into your space. The saturated reds contrast shadows that the artist meticulously sought out in his photographic framing. And the reflective paint on the figures, emphasized by printing on metallic paper, permits you to imagine the sensation of covering living, fleshy bodies with viscous paint.  

Sound, for its part, is emphasized by the varying techniques used to complete these works. An often unconsidered part of the artistic process is the sound of an artist’s labor. Here, we invite viewers to imagine the sound of these multiple methods of creation, not simply the tools in use, but also the sound of the artist’s breath as they exhale to steady themselves before capturing a photo, the sound of their hands running over the paper as they take a fresh print off the press, the sound of a the air around them as they slice through it to cover a surface with paint. What do you see when you ask yourself to do more than just look? What do you feel? Does it make sense?