Raymundo Sesma, multidisciplinary artist, was invited by Working Classroom to create with a group young student apprentices a site specific intervention conceived especially by the artist for Albuquerque, New Mexico.
This project, sponsored by Infill Solutions and Downtown Action Team, took place in a declared national historic site designed by John Gaw Meem in 1950, where the Southern Union Gas Co. was originally located.
The student apprentices who participated in the project were: Denisse Del Río, Víctor Mejía, Abraham Mejia, Dylan Ryames, Genesis Del Rio, George De la Torre, Aron Kruchoski, Michael Lopez, Lisandra Tena.
Since 2004, this Mexican artist has been developing in Italy and in Mexico a series of monumental, public, and ephemeral works, such as the museum of The Triennale di Milano, the 110,000 square feet of exterior surfaces at the Punta Norte Outtlet designed by Javier Sordo Madaleno in the State of Mexico, the former industrial space BaseB, in Milan, Italy and recently, in Basel, Swistzerland.
Raymundo Sesma, considers that “Campo Expandido” (Expanded Field) means searching for a dialogue with landscape, expanding the work field of painting without linking it to a 2D surface such as a canvas. But instead using the architectural surface and in this specific case, the sculptural characteristics of the space. Therefore the surfaces replacing the canvas, makes the paint to acquire a 3D value precisely as an expanded field.
Such intervention also denotes the creation of a new dialogue with the urban landscape, with the intention to make the sculpture transform itself into landscape that defines the work field. In that way Sesma’s work is not only a material or intellectual production that completes or reveals through an artistic gesture something exiting, but also a communication method that articulates in different levels, capable of creating a system of communicating channels between landscape, architecture, community, history, tradition, future, etc. and of course the viewer.
Campo Expandido VIII "has been built" using three architectural volumes: a small volume with two large windows, an open space with three walls and a PNM building that contains an electric generator. Campo Expandido VIII was thought as an art work that intends –with these essential architectures contextualized inside a plaza's parking lot in the City of Albuquerque–, to activate the architectural surfaces, considering the different distances between them, through encrypted texts and colors taken from the context.
Such action transformed the buildings visually into one architectural structure – which did not existed – in the surrounding landscape. This effect that is achieved through the perspectives created and revealed by the artist, invites the viewer to walk around and visually creates a virtual architecture.
Campo Expandido VIII is designed through a series of aphorisms written by Eligio Cauldron for Sesma's work, which were encrypted by the artist with the use of a computer. The aphorisms refers to the concept architects as the builders of spaces, capable to analyze the way to look at, which should not be different to the way to inhabit. According to Raymundo Sesma it's a current priority to expand the conscience of what happens and surrounds us.
"The process of encrypting, has expressed the artist, resides in hiding to the view, hiding what we already know. The result is some sort of makeup or camouflage that disguises, and is not the esthetic aspect or what pretends to be what interests, but what exists behind the appearances."
Campo Expandido VIII will be inaugurated with a photo sample of documentation of the work development.
