The works shown in the exhibition "Corazón Chilango" have been made in the last 7 years in Mexico City. The plastic artist Gorka Larrañaga (Azkoitia, 1974) presents us with a city full of contrasts, mobility, color and other elements captured in pieces that border on the sculptural, starting from the pictorial.

   "Chilango" is a word used as a demonym by inhabitants of Mexico City. Other times, it refers to someone who comes from outside the city and ends up residing permanently in it. With this appropriation of the term, the artist refers to the foreigner who begins to mutate into a chilango.

   The opening of the exhibition will be accompanied by a performance designed specifically for this exhibition. He considers this action as one of the new expressive tools that he has developed from his experience in the Mexican artistic environment and that joins the plastic work that he will present.

   The influence of the baroque found in many of the contemporary figures of Mexican daily life has led him to rescue the iconographic value of some of those elements of common use, in order to rescue them from ambiguity and explore them in depth. This need to insert Mexican objects in his work has arisen from the daily experience in the transit of the city for seven years, from being in contact with his cultural tradition, with ideas that emerge from the different points that are contrasted, in a place inhabited by approximately 20 million people. Accumulation, imbalance, asymmetry, rhythm, contrast, the "shrill" or the bizarre are some of the formal constants in his work, which is why Basque viewers will be able to observe part of the Mexican natural iconography, from a free from the natural tensions of contemporary art, an interpretation of a very complex and energetic reality. Therefore, it could be said that one of the main contributions of Gorka's work is that he is committed to translating sensations that explain the different environments that the artist has perceived in Mexico City from plastic arts, with a style that started at the beginning of elements of the Basque school and has managed to blend with the Mexican pictorial tradition.

   In these work spaces he has been able to recreate artistic environments, taking up common elements, juxtaposed with his initial context (Europe-Latin America). In his work he integrates two pictorial traditions that have already met throughout history, but that under Larrañaga's art have achieved an interesting symbiosis.

    Hence the use of the term "chilango" in the title of the exhibition. This word is used as a demonym by inhabitants of Mexico City. Other times, it refers to someone who comes from outside the city and ends up residing permanently in it. Gorka speaks to us from painting about those "intersites" or those limbos of not being one thing or the other. He speaks as a Basque from a Mexican essence but having ceased to be one and not becoming the other. With this appropriation of the term, the artist refers to the foreigner who begins to mutate into a chilango.

Gorka Larranaga