Detail from work by Calleja & exhibition poster of Gilbert Calleja Paintings

 

Gilbert Calleja Paintings

A solo exhibition by Gilbert Calleja

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In this exhibition, Gilbert Calleja explores living bodies as processes that are constantly changing, expanding, contracting, morphing into, or breaking away from the space that contains them. In Calleja’s works, the body is reactive and unruly, and the inhabited space remains fluid and ambiguous.

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The paintings and drawings presented in this exhibition are largely composite pieces, made up of different wood panels layered with various construction materials, paints, pencil, charcoal, or ballpoint pen. The works are built through successive layers of different media and materials, but they also bear the marks of extensive reworking, visceral incisions, defacements, and the destruction of prior images. It is from within this dialogue between construction and destruction that Calleja’s exploration of the human form emerges.

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The artist employs the composite form as a deliberate strategy to engage the public in rethinking the body as a tangle of limbs within entropic environments. The multitude of panels that make up the composites invites us to look, and then look again, at the same body in flux. This reiterative process draws attention not only to the reflexivity in the representation of the body that the artist seeks to evoke, but also engages us in a discourse of temporality. The recurrence of the same functions as an analytical method, interrogating the evolving relationships within a set of spatial coordinates that continually attempt, albeit unsuccessfully, to discipline the body into a semblance of unity.

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Calleja’s works challenge us to consider identity as a process of negotiating being-in and becoming-with the spaces and environments, whether real or imaginary, that we inhabit.