Where did the future go?

 

We seem to be losing the capacity to understand our position in history and in the world at

large. There is a sinking feeling that things have moved on, becoming more complex, abstract, nonlinear than they were before. The glimmers of a better future are trampled and forgotten under the pressures of an increasingly precarious and demanding present.

 

Our current infrastructure tends to shape our societies into individualistic, carbon-based, competitive forms, regardless of what individuals or collectives may want. Separation between everyday experience and the larger systems we live within results in increased alienation. We feel adrift in a world we do not understand.

 

For his latest work, artist Adrian S. Bará continues his use of commonplace, mass-produced construction materials, such as drywall panels, construction studs and cardboard. He eloquently depicts the tension generated between industrial materials and the body.

 

The ideas explored in this exhibition and the language used here to discuss them were developed during a close engagement with the text Inventing the Future:Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.

 

In this new series of paintings Bará has layered gently traced silhouettes of figures found in accumulated newspaper images, an attempt to digest the onslaught of stories and lives in our current society. The joys and sorrows, the existences briefly glimpsed through the articles are rendered in soft watercolor application. They feel like slight breaths captured in color. The figures are recorded, but the stories become blurred. When it can feel so easy to become hardened to these bigger events, or feel helpless against larger tides, these paintings are quiet reminders of beauty and hope.

 

Adrián S. Bará (b.1982, Mexico City) currently lives and works in New York, NY. This solo exhibition is a follow up to Poems to the Unknown, a solo presentation staged at NADA NY in May of last year. In February 2024 Bará had a solo exhibition titled El Heróe Absurdo at Casa Wabi in Mexico City.  He had solo presentations at PEANA (Mexico City) and SE Cooper (Portland,OR) in 2023. Recent years also included solo and group shows at The Bass Museum Art (Miami), Kasmin Gallery (NY), Páramo (Guadalajara), Travesiá Cuatro (Guadalajara), Assembly (Monticello, NY), National Academy of Design (NY), Guadalajara 90210, The Clemente (NY), Johannes Voght Gallery (NY), Zapopan Art Museum (Zapopan, Mexico), and Casey Kaplan Gallery(NY),  among other venues. He has been a resident at PIVÔ Research (São Paulo, Brazil)  and the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) (NY).

 

The artist’s training as a filmmaker drives his narrative—pulling from daily experiences and materials. The artist’s work as director of photography for films includes The Weekend Sailor (2016), Madrid International Film Festival award for best cinematography, and The Solitude of Memory (2014), included in Le Festival de Cannes 2015, and winner of the jury Award for Documentary Short at the Slamdance Film Festival.