OSCILACIONES
Galería Adentro, Guadalajara
July - September, 2024
Omar Barquet is an artist originally from Chetumal, a coastal city in the southeastern part of the Yucatán Peninsula, who has lived in Mexico City for over twenty years. The central narrative of his extensive project titled Ghost Variations stems from his childhood on the shores of the Caribbean Sea—a story that explores, in multiple ways, the lived experience of facing the threat and destruction brought by a hurricane making landfall.
Since 2012, Barquet has presented a series of exhibitions that unfold like movements in a symphonic work, such that the overall structure of the project resembles the concentric circles of a vast spiral. These circles represent both the meteorological stages of the cyclone (Disturbance, Depression, Storm, and Hurricane) and the subsequent biographical phases of the experience, encompassing the natural, social, and psycho-emotional aftermath left by the phenomenon—including the reconstruction of memory, a home, or an entire city.
In the artist’s own words: “A large part of my time has been devoted to exploring certain imagery from my childhood, trying to uncover some vital experience in my memories—to discover what one feels compelled to express from within, what has constituted you and how it has transformed you into who you are. In my case, it led me back to the hurricanes I experienced as a child and teenager: the time spent sheltered in a family-owned commercial premises while the fierce wind battered the metal shutter, creating a strange and contrasting dialogue with the flashes of piano notes from Chopin’s Nocturnes emanating from a battery-powered radio. For me, that was an amalgamation of elements and sensations that endure in my memory and which I later consciously chose to interpret in my work.”
With this motif as his point of departure, over the past twelve years Omar Barquet has created a monumental body of work that, in its vast temporal and spatial dimensions, has acquired a heterogeneous character in which painting and installation, poetry and music coexist on equal terms. The result of this hybrid practice is a large “collection of vestiges” through which the artist has explored “showing the traces of time and the fragility of objects, transforming remnants that, when combined with other materials and images, generate tensions and counterpoints, altering their meaning without ever ceasing to reveal their nature and origin.”
The analogy is inevitable, the image overwhelming: the morning after, once the roar that threatened to leave nothing standing has passed, an imperturbable silence floods everything; in the distance, on the beach, the sea lays bare its caprices upon the sand. Scattered and broken, arranged in an order foreign to reason yet not to understanding, lie the remains of a life: those twisted, wind-eroded pieces of wood that once formed part of a rocking chair, for example, or those fragments of glass torn from who-knows-what doors and windows, now reduced to shards of dull reflections. Yet one thing is certain: the sea remains, and its murmur—like an old song that is never forgotten—will serve as a constant reminder of that day, of that night.
Galería Adentro is honored to inaugurate its exhibition program with the anthological exhibition Oscilaciones (Oscillations) by artist Omar Barquet, which, for the first time in the city of Guadalajara, offers a panoramic view of his flagship project Ghost Variations.
Christian Barragán / Juvenal Urzúa
