Andrew Birk is a fan of Mexico City. He’s been obsessively recording images with his phone for years. The pictures from his Instagram account offer particular views and fragments of the city in which seek to emphasize certain affinities with some solutions of contemporary art and stand out a persistence of painting. The latter is logical when you consider that this is the central practice of his production. Callejero is a large scale project that seeks, from painting, to represent an image of the city consisting of different fragments, as the ones recorded in photographs. However, Birk’s work transcends the simple domain of representation, in the manner of a stage. While largely focused on research about this medium, Callejero goes beyond the two-dimensional and has a wide sensory load. The paintings and other objects articulate a complex situation, assisted by different stimuli (audio, lighting). Through the solution of his works and all other objects he gets to include the dense, rough, polluted and even sometimes hostile materiality of the city in the scene.

Birk works this out with a number of materials and objects that have been found in the city or are easily available in the market (industrial products that are in any paint store or ironmongery and that are used practically all over the city for example). Proofs of this are the vinyl paints, aerosols and products like Bondo, used to restore and resurface car damages. Birk relates the process of application of this product specifically with his practice. After being polished, this material provides a finish that sometimes diffuses white color, characteristic of Bondo, among different shades of colors of automotive paint. This material, moreover, is also used in some of the two-dimensional works; its application remembers the appearance of thousands of flattened concrete constructions from the city that, over the time, have been systematically covered by countless layers of paint (vinyl coated, spray as graffiti, etc.). Some small format pieces also have this dense materiality. One of these, which has several photocopies, excerpts of tape and a cord around them has a solution that could easily be found on a utility pole.

This image of the city is framed by the walls of the gallery that have been painted entirely in black and white on a site specific grid, without advance planning. This design recalls the many walls in this city made of volcanic stone and, over the years, have been painted in black, using the white on the concrete to clearly demarcate the boundaries between rock and rock. In this mural dimensión painting Birk tries not accurately represent these walls. In this sense, Callejero does not aspire to realism. In another small format painting, the artist appropriates an animated character from cultural industry to transform it into a strange creature that seems to be upset, witnessing a deranged, exalted, passionate about the city. If the presence of stimuli, extreme materiality of some pieces, fragments of broken bottles and the presence of broken and screwed objects may denote and cause hostility; this finds its counterpart in the intrinsic degree of discomfort that characterizes daily life in the city.

-- Daniel Garza Usabiaga

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It is an experience. Its not just the food; its the plates, the walls, the lighting, its the smells, the noises, the street outside, the restaurant sign hanging off the building, its the people eating and talking around you, its how you feel afterwards, belly full, sitting on the curb enjoying a cigarette. Look for it and you will see it blowing through your garden, making you plug your ears and crinkle your nose. At its highest form there is no good or bad, just is. It surrounds us, every second of every day.

Painting was my first probe into this world. Examining painting, inside and outside of the frame, is what exposed me to the limits and possibilities of art. The edge of one thing is the door to another thing. Im looking for paintings in places that paintings (proper) shouldnt be, or arent. But paintings are everywhere, a shadow of a cloud can be a painting, compositions are everywhere. Every object you step around can be a sculpture, every environment can be an installation. Art exists in all places that a human exists.

My recent work is a limited attempt to apply this framework, which will admittedly take my entire life, if that, to understand. I am learning. I dont mind failure because Im not sure what that is. I dont mind success because Im not sure what that is, either. I want to see what happens.

The way tacos de canasta posters are wheat-pasted to a concrete pillar that sustains the segundo piso outside of the hospital. The build-up of dirt and exhaust that obscures visual information. Objects flung to the side of the road weathering in the sun. Metal wires and rivets and nails tied to things or sticking out of things rusting. The stickers on your car. The hats on your head. The way the sound of a diesel engine mixes with pawn-shop Cumbia. Hammers hitting. A helicopter flies over you. Right now is a piece.

If I am feeling heart-broken I focus on details that reinforce that. If I am in love I focus on details that reinforce that. Everything in-between. A dog pulling the leash from smell to smell. I focus on my experience, its just mine, and its a bottomless well that Ill always be able to draw from.



-- Andrew Birk