Diacronisms (2021-2022)

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The pictorial intervention of time in the absolute work

When we talk about the pictorial evolution of a work of art, we frame ourselves within various contexts that can happen around it: the passage of time in the object (the artwork itself) or the passage of time in the subject (the artist or the viewer themselves). However, within the context of this exhibition, when we speak of the passage of time "through...," we enter a relative time related to the intervention of an interpreter of pictorial expression, Christian Mera, and thus we become participants in the relativity of this author.

This is how Mera's technique unfolds: "through...," diachronically, over the fictive time of a work of art. The author and his work are defined through that prepositional phrase that inserts itself into the time of a painting and its stationary environment on the original support.

In this context, it would seem that each of the original works referenced in this exhibition, signified in the manner of... (by Mera) and in the time of... (by Mera), were photosensitive and, after the passage of years — a passage with a wide range of exposure spanning from four centuries to fifty years of slow, slow, very slow exposure — they would have received all kinds of stationary (luminous) waves that resonated on the supports and marked lines of expression in the pictorial environment of each canvas.

Christian does this in this collection. He takes absolute works of art, paradigmatic works for him — and models for many — and replicates them in their depiction, albeit proposing subtle changes in color, nuances, changes in device order, and even adding elements of symbolic significance that did not inhabit the environments of the original works (a prolepsis in Sánchez Gallque's work, for example).

Now, the subtleties reach that level; since then, Christian distances himself from the academy that replicates and connects with the expression that will alter the atmospheric pressure of the painting, his own, which ceases to be a replica and becomes a work of original expression. The vitreous humor of the artist, Mera's, fills with those mentioned stationary waves and transfers them to the replicated canvases. He transfers them diachronically, "through...," and thus defines a painting of action in the present and a system of graphological writing unique to the author.

In summary, Christian Mera's graphological diachronisms are energized through a range of four centuries of pictorial exposure with a minimal, minimal, but minimal shutter speed; one that discovers the plastic value of an author of our time. And so, the atmospheric pressure of each painting is expressed altered by Christian Mera's pictorial time.

Humberto Montero, May 2022.