21 WADE AVE #2 | TORONTO
Raúl Aguilar Canela | Smart like a sun | 16 may - 15 june 2024
Intelligence is in the world: the way a plant turns to the sun
“The abstract machine . . . is diagrammatic . . .
It operates by matter, not by substance; by function not by form.”
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
Smart like a sun is a collection of abstract drawings situated in the emergence of new domesticity practices as a contemporary condition of living at the turn of post-pandemic times matching a 2024 solar eclipse momentum.
The drawings of Smart like a sun, unfold from a practice of ‘thought without an image’ (Gilles Deleuze); which is a terrain of experience moving in the realm of pleasure of just doing that vehemently asks not to be disturbed by the moment in which a word cuts out its ectasis by holding it prey to a standing point of fixity. It asks to remain in pure flow and ‘pure experience’ (William James) so that it can feel that, the joy of pure shape and intensive colorality amassed by, if you look closely, an extremely precise dexterity and expertise of meticulous texturized pressure. Carefully cultivated technique and skill is not aside.
Here, art is not about something else, nor birthed from a reference to an outside. It stands by itself in self-referentiality. We may be tempted by a tendency to experience our encounter with each drawing, by comparing it and assigning it a similarity with a recognizable, legible else; but what if this could be resisted? The invitation then would be to practice a different modality of encounter. Will we be courageous enough to get there? To align ourselves to where the artist takes us and turn toward the other side of things? Could we range ourselves with what the practice demands? To leave it all behind, to come back from work, to think of nothing, to just spend time, to enter a zone of doing and hence zone out from the world as we have supposedly built it. Such place of zoning into a new domesticity of the contemporary life we live today is also the world, these drawings soundly make such a claim, that asks for that other space in life, which needs to be defended by practices of invention. In this latter sense the work is political, engaged with tearing apart the script with the mire of creating other modes for what life may also be.
Raúl Aguilar Canela´s present body of work in drawing, defies cognizant mechanisms, swiveling itself through the most commonly known pathways of departing from a concept toward the creation of an art piece; such an exhausted status quo mostly imposed by the art school that although great, is also always accompanied by its own echo that screams a need to remain impervious to such impetus so as to not give ourselves entirely into it.
Aguilar Canela’s work instead, is going somewhere else. The work excels in executing a paramount exegesis of non-representational art at its best, by pivoting into the world, with the proposal of an intelligence that lies exactly there, in that commitment of giving oneself to just doing something. Such practice reclaims an intelligence in that doing, in experience itself, before interpretation, before the word, and into the world. Such an intelligence is in drawing itself, in the act, an intelligence of actions themselves, in what Aguilar Canela calls “affective strategies which consist in modes of working through the condensations of pure affects with a rigorous practice of spending time through energy accumulation, palpitations, convulsions, giving way into creative obsessions as earworms that sink into your head and need to be repeated until they are over”, until its doing has receded by the means of having had been created, “giving way to art as a mode of generating its skin from that”, and as a way of the making itself of temporality. If anything, these drawings do, is that they craft the art of time.
“The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent,
even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come,
a new type of reality.”
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
In the words of the artist: “I like doing art for the pleasure of just doing it, the way you sing in the car just because you feel like it and nothing else”. But this just doing is not the one we easily discard as disconnected or banal, it actually dives itself into a deepness of the world by creating another reality. Aguilar Canela’s work is totally in touch with the colours of the textures of our era, he speaks for today and thus for tomorrow. The artist is aware of what is happening, of the spirit of a new art, an art that invokes a word to refer to it, a word that rumbles around it, I will call it a new exo-sci-fi-terism of contemporary art, for lack of a better word, but also because it needs a new term that doesn’t tag it or pin-point it to a type of art that already exists because something is clear, by venturing into the pulses of its own craft, Raúl’s art stretches the panorama of what is possible, extends the world of contemporary art, creating it anew.
Since the work may invite us to encounter it differently, here a proposal: if you were to pack this show into an ice-cream, and invent a flavor for it, what name would you give it? This is an art that says nothing. Finally! This is an art that synesthetically colors a page that tastes hanky-panky, smoothy-fuzzy, acidoustropic-licious, fluffy-care bears-bus-buzzy-flirtatious.
To encounter one of these drawings is to follow arduously an invitation toward a new hope, outside of the world of our professions, our tired discourses, outside of the things we do, into dismantling what we supposedly know. As these drawings do, so that we can go, jump, travel, move and dis-morph; and therefore go, into the realm of the so much needed, wanted under the silent thunders of a ferociously calmed desire that in its intelligence in the world, turns and roars toward those other places of existence where it also lies as tonal and sonorous life.
– Mayra Morales
Raúl Aguilar Canela is a Mexican-born artist based in Montreal whose main work explores painting as a post-medium practice. His current work serves as a space to converge personal stories with contemporary metanarratives of individual determination, self-exploitation, immigration, masculinity, and hard work. He received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA) in 2021. He graduated with a BFA from Concordia University (Montréal) in 2014 and a Bachelor in International Relations from Universidad de las Américas, (Puebla) in 2011. Aguilar Canela has participated in residency programs at Banff Centre and Est-Nord-Est. His solo exhibitions include I’ll teach my kids how to be aesthetically correct at Centre CLARK (2017), The State of Our Employability at TAP Art Space (2018) both in Montreal, and To my friends at Egret Egress (2019) in Toronto. In 2019, his work was selected to be part of the Bienal de Pintura Rufino Tamayo XVIII, in México City.
Mayra Morales is a non and infra disciplinary Mexican artist, philosopher, writer and pedagogue navigating the realms of dance, choreography, and performance from her dual bases in Montréal and Cholula. With a forthcoming PhD titled A Philosophy of Movement, she delves into the relation of action, practice and thought toward research-creation projects. Currently, Morales lends her expertise to the 3 Ecologies Project, exploring anarchiving techniques and translating philosophical works into Spanish, all while embarking on a new frontier of writing for dance and art events. With six years of experience as a movement festival curator and thirteen years as a University Assistant Professor, Morales is dedicated to fostering collective learning environments that ignite transformative, playful and powerful creation. As an artist she is developing a solo performance called Sweet Petunias with a coming residency at Studio 303 during the summer.