Labyrinth of wonder
A solo exhibition at Leica Gallery Mexico City, the result of the gallery's first artist residency in collaboration with Proyecto H, a groundbreaking initiative within the Leica world. The exhibition presented an exploration of the city from a perspective that transforms urban visual chaos into clean and ordered compositions. Gregorio Díaz's work stands out for finding, through his camera, an order and purity absent in the real city. His interest in urban color transforms tarpaulins into backdrops, walls into canvases, and passersby into chromatic accents, evoking the abstraction of Mondrian and Malevich. Gregorio portrays an ideal city, where the gaze rises to the sky, not the pavement. His camera is the key with which he deciphers the territory and reveals the hidden essence in the folds of the urban landscape.
During the second half of 2022 I was invited to participate in the photographic record of the process of making a large curtain. Curtain inspired by Delia Zapata Olivella. It was imagined and painted by Pedro Ruiz, created together with a team of artists, painters, embroiderers, conservators, cabinetmakers and many other people involved in the process.
In mid-December 2022, the curtain was lowered, rolled up, and at midnight it was transported on a low bed from La Sabana Station to its new home. On March 22, 2023, the National Arts Center opened its doors. This is its curtain.
A project of the Cali Workshop School Foundation.
This solo exhibition was held as part of the first Leica Gallery Mexico City artist residency in collaboration with Proyecto H gallery. For a month, Gregorio Díaz wandered the streets of Mexico City, which he described as an “unfathomable labyrinth,” finding in photography a way to pause the city’s chaotic and dazzling rhythm. The exhibition, Instrucciones para inventar una ciudad, unfolds as a series of observations of the urban landscape, resolved in the geometric forms and primary colors so characteristic of Díaz’s lens.
