FOG: A Mural for San Francisco

A Solo Exhibition and Installation by Alvaro Verduzco

 

FOG is an invitation of remembering as a form of imaginative mental travel through drawings of iconic-like memories.  The processes of memory and drawing are crucial for understanding our knowledge of the world and our relationships with others. Remembering and drawing allow us to explore our individual identities as well as those of others by combining the internal and external traces of memory.

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Álvaro Verduzco (Mexico City, 1977) works between these two concepts of remembrance by directly drawing onto the slanting walls of Incline gallery, turning them into a foggy canvas. ​In the tradition of Modern Mexican muralism, Verduzco’s graphite mural is meant to open our understanding of what large-scale work can do.  He does this by abandoning the didactic spirit and dogmatic strategies that the traditional muralists followed, whose work had a definitive message. Instead, in the slow evolving mural of Fog, Verduzco embraces the hazy and opaque atmosphere that surges when individual and collective memories meet the imagination of each.  Each on their own terms and by their own lights, and not as the consequence of the pedagogy of the painter.   Verduzco’s ephemeral mural is an open-ended invitation to look, but not to just see, but to imagine.   

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The mural Verduzco has been drawing at Incline Gallery for three weeks supports the idea of an external memory able to exist between the two concepts of memory presented: the individual and the collective in one place. In a sense, as you make your way through the miniscule drawings using either your eyes or binoculars provided, your imagination operates to adjust, add, shape, or to understand the image in new way. Each experience is a new and radically different way of seeing; indeed, of reimagining the past. In this way, seeing the exhibition becomes a way of remembering, and creating your own personal narrative. 

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In addition to the mural, there are two books of drawings made just for this exhibition. The first offers the idea of internal memory travel, marked by the artist’s numbered pages in his 17 year-long visual diary of more than 6,000+ drawings.  Then, Verduzco pairs seventy-eight historical Bay Area dates, and matches them with the numbered drawings in the visual diary used to create corresponding book of City Traces. This mashup of historical dates (i.e.1988, the date Google was founded) and the number assigned to each drawing in Alvaro’s diary match and playfully lead to unexpected coincidences, and new meanings that people see on their own. Verduzco offers a way of showing his personal practice of daily drawing as a way of looking at the history of places, in this case the Bay Area.

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The second book of drawings is Verduzco’s journal for the imagining, designing, and creating of FOG: A Mural for San Francisco.  In this series of drawings, the artist’s own private life is reflected meandering through the process of preliminary sketches of the exhibition space, notes on the intended viewer experience, along with 10 images chosen by Christo Oropeza from his personal daily journal drawings.  These drawings connect his local travels in Mexico’s beaches and deserts, along with their counterparts in his previous travels to the Bay Area and its coast.  Images of beach scenes, rocks, shells, trees, wildfires, and ending with a drawing of the iconic tiles of Mission Street.