Proscenios literarios is the first career review of artist Jorge Méndez Blake, whose production has stood out on the national and international scene.

Under the curatorship of Víctor Palacios, the original exhibition of 59 works was produced by the Museo Cabañas, in Guadalajara, and was financed by EFIARTES in 2023, through resources granted by the company Tracsa.

As part of MARCO’s institutional collaboration strategies, the exhibition arrives in Monterrey in an expanded version, with 103 works on display, distributed mostly in galleries 1 to 4 on the first floor; part of the production will also be exhibited outside the galleries. The complete neon series Biblioteca completa (2021-2023), with 17 works added to total 30 pieces in the project, will be on view on the walls of the Patio Central.

Méndez Blake has explored literature and architecture in his 30-year career, in both cases from a historical perspective, either by revisiting classic authors of literature or aspects of ancient or modern architecture. He addresses what is found around reading and writing, sometimes assuming the exercise of a writer without the final product being a book, on the contrary, he presents images, portraits of the artist as he writes, video narratives, annotations in the margins of the pages that are the trace of his reading, or framed poems that the public can read.

The second interest is linked to his training as an architect graduated from ITESO. In his works, architecture is a natural language that he shows in model format, which considers architectural forms worked in different materials, from the most accessible such as acrylic, to the most sophisticated such as marble.

Another part of his projects is linked to libraries, a subject that Méndez Blake has investigated to make sense of the concept and definition of this type of space, from its function to its content and the possibility of knowledge it offers to the user. In a way, this exploration encompasses architectural and literary interests, since the structure of a bookcase can remind us of the skeleton of buildings, and at the same time, the bookcases of a library are pieces of furniture that concentrate copies of literary works and other subjects.

The review of Palacios’ mid-career presents a journey through the artist’s creative process and the interests he has recurrently addressed in his discourse, under a chronological logic. To address these two interests, Palacios proposes to view his production from the term “proscenium”, which in the structure of an amphitheater is the backstage area between the audience and the stage. It functions as a threshold where one can either walk into the audience space or walk onto the stage and become part of the play.

“It’s very clear; there are only two sentences. One: I have to write because I need to, even though I admit that I don’t know how to do it. And another: since I don’t know how to do it, I have to not write.” 
“The Empty Book,” Josefina Vicens

“If there is one truly interdisciplinary problem, it is that of reading.”
“Variations on Writing,” Roland Barthes

The curtain begins to rise, the page is about to be turned, the “W” key is about to be pressed, the reading is about to begin, the library and the ruin are close to extinction. It seems that Jorge Méndez Blake has found a way to suspend and prolong these interstitial lapses/spaces. It is in the poetics and evolution of these that his work takes place. 

This retrospective exhibition brings together a collection of works created by this prolific and interdisciplinary artist over the last two decades. Their display in the exhibition space is far from chronological, instead seeking to evoke a scenographic, architectural, and interstitial space: the proscenium. In particular, those that were a central part of ancient Greek and Roman theaters. Liminal spaces between the orchestra and the stage where the action took place.

Immersed in his own prosceniums, JMB exposes, diversifies, and brings into play the driving force behind his creative impulse: to transfer, project, and translate core questions about the nature of language, the vast realm of literature, and architecture into the field of visual arts. In his avid and multifaceted reading practice, this artist edits, recycles, corrupts, and reinterprets literary works and spaces of various kinds to weave together a range of simultaneous narratives through painting, drawing, video, sculpture, installation, and the concomitant pairing of writing and reading. Write, unwrite, and rewrite to ask yourself, as semiologist Roland Barthes did: Where does reading begin? How far does it go? Can we assign a structure, boundaries, to this production? Let’s enter the amphitheater, open the discussion, the democratic exchange! Let’s desecrate the library, its archetypal order, the sterile repetition of slogans and stagnant knowledge! Just as JMB does, let’s defend poetry and imagine other literatures! 

Víctor Palacios