“In the same way that walls had historically borne the weight of painting in its vertical stance, the architecture of this space granted me the rare opportunity to suspend a pictorial plane across the horizontal.”
Guillermo Mora
Starting in 2010, I began developing a series of works composed solely of folded layers of paint, later held and pressed together with elastic bands. Behind these “packs” of pure paint lay a slow formation process that began with the pouring of large amounts of paint onto the studio floor. The pools of color would spread across the space randomly and irregularly, left to dry for about a month before being peeled off the ground and folded.
Parallel to this practice, an opposing idea began to take shape in my mind: what if those pools could become rigid instead of flexible? What if the paint stain could be transformed once again into a surface—into a screen—and made to float? In a sense, it was a return to the tableau, to the traditional pictorial plane. Just as I had spent years peeling layers off the floor only to fold them, this new project began to take form: to be able to lift a rigid painted surface off the floor, to elevate it, detach it from the ground, and let it exist freely in space.
Lifting a painted plane off the ground and making it float was impossible (as gravity would have it), so I needed to find a way to anchor it to the surrounding architecture. That’s where the question arose: what if the architecture itself could hold the plane of color? If painting has hung vertically for centuries, why not “hang” it horizontally, from side to side?
I envisioned the columns of Tabacalera holding the painting from one end to the other. Just as walls have long borne the weight of painting in a vertical format, the architecture of this space offered me the opportunity to support a pictorial plane horizontally.
By embedding it into the space—wedging it in tightly—the paint became both held and contained, activating the architecture and giving it an assertive, exhibition-like presence.
