Bajo el mango

It has been said that what we usually understand as perfection is nothing more than the interruption of a process. A photo taken at that precise moment. I stare at the mango in the fruit bowl, turning black—the one I didn’t eat at its precise moment—and I no longer see a mango: I see my horror. I want to remove it from my sight, throw it in the trash as soon as possible. If I were able to observe that rotten fruit with the refined attention of a 16th-century Dutch painter, perhaps I might be able to contemplate how, from its chromatic decay, a dark and metaphysical aura emanates, and draw a moral: a memento mori. But if I were to look at the black mango the way Vivian Suter looks at a canvas,or, rather, the way a canvas by Vivian Suter invites me to see it, what would I see?

I see the canvases that make up Bajo el mango, Vivian Suter’s exhibition currently on view in Madrid, and I don’t know what I’m seeing, but at least I know I’m not seeing photos taken at the precise moment. I’m reminded of El sol del membrillo, the extraordinary film in which Víctor Erice documented Antonio López’s seemingly futile attempts to paint the fruit of a quince tree growing in the courtyard of his studio. Every day López begins his work again and every day, in his demanding realism, he fails, for the ripening process of the elusive fruit, along with the changes in light brought about by the passing of the seasons, do not align with the time needed to portray it. Someone then asks him why he doesn’t simply take a photo of the quince to use as a model for the impossible painting, to which López replies, as I recall, that what matters to him more than painting the quince is simply being with the quince. On a formal level, López and Suter might seem like very different artists; and yet, López’s words about his own work now speak to me about Suter’s work as well: what matters is being beneath the mango tree.

What lies beneath a mango tree? A rotting mango, fruits that turn black and burst with flies, ants, and bees, in a horrible and sweet swarm of life. And deeper down, the roots that drink secret waters, and pits that germinate, and pits that do not germinate and, as they decompose, return to the earth what the ancient roots that gave them life took from the earth. And even deeper down, the dead from whom dreams draw their nourishment.And deeper still, the mineral gods; and even deeper, the invisible and the unspeakable, which sometimes emanate to the surface like a breath. Just as there are geological layers, Suter’s paintings can be understood as pictorial layers. Surfaces that, through accumulation, sculpturally document the marvelous history of their endless process.

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Errata: where I said “work,” I meant “flow”; where I said “process,” I meant “dream”; where I said “exhibition,” I meant “jungle.”

– Luis Felipe Fabre

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with GAGA, CDMX.