Land
scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
LandEscape meets
Adrian Regnier An interview by Katherine Williams, curator and Josh Ryders, curator landescape@europe.com
Visual artist Adrian Regnier's work rejects any conventional classifications and is marked with freedom as well as rigorous formalism, when encapsulating a careful attention to composition and balance. In his La Fuga series that we'll be discussing in the following pages, he effectively challenges the relationship between the viewers' perceptual parameters and their cultural substratum to induce them to elaborate personal associations, offering them a multilayered aesthetic experience. One of the most impressive aspects of Regnier's work is is the way it accomplishes the difficult task of unveiling the ubiquitous connections between microcosm and macrocosm: we are very pleased to introduce our readers to his stimulating and multifaceted artistic production. Hello Adrian and welcome to LandEscape: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid formal training and you graduated in the field of Visual Arts from the National School of Sculpture, Painting and Engraving, "La Esmeralda". How did this experience influence your evolution as an artist? And in particular, how does your cultural
Hello, thank you for having me, it is a great honor to be featured in LandEscape. Let’s go! I enrolled into “La Esmeralda” on 2008, fresh out of high school; I was a very different person back then. Up until then, I had a very integral
upbringing: strong academic and cientific influences, surroundings and practices, as well as deep fascinations with all things related to drawing, video games, scienc fiction and political history. When it came to choosing paths, it was a very, very close call between art school and pursuing a career in physics – utlimatelly, my lifelong connection with drawing proved more alluring. Even then, my relationship with art and culture was the polar opposite of what it is now; and art school was “kind” enough to show me the error of my ways. You see, without prior relations to the art world, I based my early artistic endeavors on the mere refining of a very specific set of drawing skills. As I saw it then, “success as an artist” boiled down to the emotionally equivalent of “being the very best at what there was”; coupled with La Esmeralda’s everaspirational tendencies and predatory atmosphere, I spent the first two years of art school in this perfect miasma of a storm. A disclaimer here: I intend not to sound bitter, but rather to objectively describe the specific way in which Mexico’s cultural system has functioned since I first dipped my feet into it. You see, Mexico (as many other “ ’developed’ countries in development”) is in a constant state of cultural implosion: over-centralization, cuts in funding and a general misconception of the inter-connectivity of things have constructed a cultural panorama that is not only comprised by vague niches and the fleeting occupants that come to fill them, but that is also very fickle to the broader, more universal currents to which it is a subset to. In sum, I see it as a fleeting imaginary of social upheaval with very little impact in general: akin