Carlos Vielma
Saltillo 1982

Visual artist graduated as an Architect; he works with painting, graphics, video and installation with themes such as the border and longing.

He has been a recipient of the Scholarship "Jóvenes Creadores" by FONCA. Also he has carried out artistic residencies at the Banff Center in Canada, at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá and at Casa Wabi in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, among others.

He has been selected multiple times at Salón ACME and various biennials in Mexico and the United States.

He is currently a member of the National System of Art Creators and lives and works in Mexico City.

Monolito, 2022
Steel sheet and mirrors
Variable measures

Report from the Wasteland

Who will be, in the not too distant future, the Christopher Columbus of some planet?

Amado Nervo

Coordinates: 25° 41' 45'' N 101° 45' 59''. A probe is sent to inspect the rugged topography of the border desert. On the expedition he discovers an unusual find: a steel monolith. Its invasive presence governs the central composition of the minimalist scene. He also finds, buried in the sand, a golden plate based on the design of the Pioneer 10 probe with an enigmatic inscription. Disconcerting vestiges, collapsed buildings, bushes, dust, oblivion. Constellation of environmental elements that structure the cinematographic plot of My battery is low and it's getting dark, the first individual exhibition in Mexico City by the artist Carlos Vielma (Saltillo, 1982).

Due to its high narrative value, the show takes a significant turn in Vielma's production and visual language, although it gives continuity to his central thematic concerns: the border landscape, the monument, and architecture. The main trigger is the video that witnesses the journey of the apocryphal space probe on Mars, Coahuila, a ghost town located in the middle of the highway. Immortalized through painting, drawing and video, Mars appears to us as a universe in ruins, desolate, melancholic, empty of horizons, where, even though some signs of its occupation are palpable, there are no signs of human life. This perhaps derives from the pessimistic feeling of speculating about a world after the catastrophe. With the lexicon of science fiction a powerful allegory is built. Through this genre –unusual in the field of Mexican visual arts–, sociohistorical problems of peripheral contexts in the north of the country and the tensions between modernity and backwardness are enunciated.

A Ray Bradbury short story titled “A Million Year Picnic” serves as inspiration. It tells the story of Timothy, a young man who travels with his family to the planet Mars, with the deceptive premise of organizing a day of fishing and, incidentally, catching a glimpse of the Martians. Tim discovers on the way that his father has hatched the plan as a way to escape planet earth: a war wiped out the entire population and they must start over as colonists. If the expectation was to spot the Martians, when they peer into the river water they discover that, from now on, they will be the Martians. The absurd approach of the American writer establishes a futuristic and overwhelming tone. Various references from music, film and literature intertwine in a chamber of echoes: Laurie Anderson's experimental music, Henry Cowell's expanded piano compositions, the 2001 space epic A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick, and the rural and ghostly spatiality of Comala in Pedro Páramo (“Empty carts, swirling the silence of the streets. And the shadows. The echo of the shadows.”)

We invite you to follow with your gaze the disorienting path of the artificial machine. As he approaches the monolith, trying to trace the origin of the strange background sound, the image gives back a double and unexpected reflection: the viewer is confronted with the screen –as in Bradbury's story– with his own face projected. From reflection comes revelation. If the human race perished, what would remain from the rubble? Reminder of expiration, of our transience, but also of our survival. Memento I died. The landscapes of Mars evoke longing and remoteness before an unreachable point in outer space. Carlos Vielma documents the wonderful visual chronicle from a barren terrain.

Polvo I, 2022
Dust on canvas
220 x 150 cm

Polvo VII, 2022
Dust on canvas
40 x 50 cm

Polvo doméstico

Earth eddies run. The sepia cloaks fall, stealing depth from the landscape, giving its features and colors the unreality of a grotesque decal, of an old print.

Alfonso Reyes

The limits of the borders are poetic because of what accumulates in them: people, sediments, barriers that contain dust, dead cells that will eventually deteriorate into the dirt that we carry on our shoes.
Polvo Domestico is a series of pieces made from the dirt of the sidewalks in the center of border cities in northern Mexico. Carlos adjusts stencils on fabrics as an analogy of the limit and later he walks the sidewalks and streets of these cities called passing through surfacing the fabrics. The intention is to reflect in a metaphorical way on what the limit contains, exploring images that represent the longing and the impossibility of crossing or socially integrating with the neighboring territory, working with border icons such as plaques, monuments, the landscape and words.