FASMA 2025 - Exhibition of the Work of Enrique Guillén Sáenz (Opening)

Exhibition of the work of the master Enrique Guillén Sáenz. Oil paintings on canvas, presented with great talent and colorful.

His work stems from questioning the human condition and observing nature. Interested in the notion of space and the idea of movement in painting, he works on figuration from a perspective influenced by the dynamism of abstract expressionism and the balance of Zen painting.

The social aspect is the central axis of his production addressing topics such as migration, poverty, armed conflicts, and the everyday life in today's society. With this, he seeks to reflect on the course of humanity and the consequences of its actions, keeping himself away from moral issues.

He graduated in visual arts from the University of Guadalajara in 2015, but his pictorial education is owed to the Masters José Ignacio Maldonado and Margarette Dawit, who took him under their wing in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato between 2001-2003.

For a long time, from the beginning of my education until just a few years ago, I tried to stay within the limits of "reality". Nothing that was not credible in painting interested me.

Contact with literature helped me loosen the knots that tied me to that solid and heavy world in which I was trapped. I cannot, and do not want to, deny my taste for painting that arises from the deep observation of the "solid reality" as it has helped me understand form, space, and matter, hence my taste for still life and natural landscape.

However, this time I allowed myself to play a little with imagination to build stories and reconstruct memories in a more lighthearted way, freeing myself from the formal weight of "serious painting" by including more drawing and colors that I would not have allowed myself before.

I wanted to accompany the exhibition with sketches, color tests, and notes from various paintings to share part of the work process and show the importance of drawing in my painting, as it is the primary tool with which I land ideas, with which I can change the mental world, break it down, and put it back together while I understand it. Drawing is thinking, it is a language that does not contain words, but weaves of lines and spots: graphite warps containing the world.

The pieces that are yet to be seen are nourished from two sources: literature, on one hand and social issues, on the other. It is not my cause to talk about specific social events, but I use them to raise questions about existence more related to the human experience. Issues such as forced disappearance, migration, poverty, and childhood are approached with the intention of serving as a reminder that there are topics we should not forget.

The veracity of these stories lies in that their memory awakens sensations in me that I tried to address pictorially. The important thing is there, in the sensation they could awaken, not in the fidelity of the facts or in the perfect description of the forms.

Enrique Guillén Sáenz.
San Miguel de Allende, Gto., 2024.

From August 7 to 31, daily from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM.