There is something magnetic about Ana Roldán’s work, a kind of reverie that unfolds through the gallery’s boundaries. She uses forms that are quite common, and yet these same forms feel distant to us. Perhaps it’s because of the detail. Each part makes the whole feel like an unknown place. This Mexican artist, based in Zurich, accustomed to working around the revision of Modernity or the idea of nation and identity, offers us this time a constellation that connects different manifestations of nature without leaving behind her constant interest in language. A tribute to the force of natural elements.
Under the title Drawing a Circle, Ana Roldán presents her third exhibition at FormatoComodo. Pieces like Frizzy (2022) or Green Mirror (2022-2023) play with space and suggest other paths: the possibility of generating a natural environment within the gallery. That mirror, that circle of water drawn on the floor, not only reflects the strange bronze branch with those challenging glass bubbles but also invites us to think of a new atmosphere. We might almost call it a small portal. A void that outlines another dimension.
The artist shows other much more random configurations of nature in Chaos Theory (2024) and Negative Bodies (2016). Relating to the canvases of the first series, our minds remain restless until they believe to identify the forms dancing on the fabrics. In the second case, Ana Roldán draws black lines using neon lights that slide across the wall to develop different appearances.
Ana Roldán’s constant interest in language and its multiple aspects is evident in two cases. One is War Landscapes (2024), synthetic drawings sprinkled with hostile words, where she composes these landscapes on its surface based on the drawing method of the Mexican artist Adolfo Best Maugard, a resource she has previously used in other works. We see her own alphabet with which she suggests violent spaces, border spaces, spaces of death. The other case is her piece Translator (Jessie) (2016), part of a series titled Prophets, where she insinuates the image of Jessie, an interpreter in the middle of a conversation, an intermediary figure capable of connecting us with a nature to which we have no access, which is nothing but a language foreign to our own.
Without presenting herself in an absolute manner, but rather facilitating reflection, Ana Roldán creates a space for pause while raising different questions about the oscillation between dream and experience.