Guillermo Trejo

Under the initiative of curator Stefan St- Laurent, Galerie SAW Gallery in Ottawa has launched a new programming project titled New Ottawa Artist Spotlight, aimed at bringing greater exposure to the burgeoning art scene that exists below the bureaucratic and blockbuster exhibitions the capital city is renowned for. Presenting the first major solo exhibition in Canada by Mexican-born artist Guillermo Trejo, St-Laurent has again transformed his basement exhibition space into an exemplary showcase for local, emerging talent. Pure walls and sparse design are not characteristic of SAW, yet the crisp, white-cube approach is befitting of Trejo’s work; several series of intimate black-and-white watercolour drawings run horizontally throughout the gallery against a backdrop of the artist’s stark, graffiti-like wall murals, reminiscent of those found in street protests and political upheavals. Along the southern wall of the gallery, Trejo’s most recent series of meticulously rendered, untitled works pairs his reproductions of disparate political events—shaded terrorists with pop star Lindsay Lohan, chanting protesters with Justin Bieber in mid-performance—that encourage the viewer to make freely associated links among the groupings. Proposing an equalization in the imagery of of Western Pop culture with international upheaval may prove unsuccessful, the sensationalism of the imagery being in fact too overt to be fully effective. However, when the viewers turn their attention to the opposite side of the gallery, the artist’s strong critical standpoint is evident. Here, in the eerily calm space, there is the sense that they may be observing the aftermath of such upheavals—the walls scarred with black ink, and Trejo’s drawings acting as witnesses to the violent acts.

Pulling his source imagery directly from the pages of free daily news sources such as 24 and Metro, Trejo aims to politicize the act of witnessing, viewing and reading the imagery of conflict and violence. The artist—who studied at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Etching in Mexico City and is currently completing his Master’s of Fine Arts at the University of Ottawa—describes drawing as akin to reading. As a child, he was taught the alphabet by tracing over each letter with his hand or a pencil to physically reinforce its shape and memory. The visceral association he has to language has carried through to his art practice, and for him, meticulously copying images from news media is a way to both slow the daily bombardment of disposable imagery and to better understand each photograph.

The series of Untitled diptychs that line the north wall of the gallery space are the most effective example of the artist’s intent. Here, a selection of 8 x 10 inch watercolours—simplified, yet precisely copied facsimiles of international conflicts taken from the print media—are rendered in soft hues of black, grey and white, and each is paired with a Cy Twombly-esque page of hashes, brushstrokes and blotches in the same watery tones. The complete series comprises of over 120 diptychs Trejo completed daily during the months of September through December 2010. More than simple formal pairings, the abstract sketches are in fact the pages on which Trejo cleaned his brush while making his drawings. The lyrical arrangement of brushstrokes that dance across each page stand in exact contrast to the harshness of the subject matter they helped create. Framed as groupings, both images carry the same weight; equalized in their presentation, they stand as different versions of the artist’s interpretation of the original news clipping. Their critical, deconstructive power lies in the way they ask us to return to the structure of the original image, to reread the lines and tones that form it and to bear witness to the physical, if not sociological, process of their creation. It is in its understated simplicity that this series of works succeeds and the critical potential of Trejo’s works truly emerges. ❚

Guillero Trejo: New Ottawa Artist Spotlight was exhibited at Galerie SAW in Ottawa from March 17 to April 16, 2011.

Rhiannon Vogl is an Ottawa-based writer and curator.