Manero crosses time through the resource of memory with the projection of images
of transitions from one state of life to another: birthdays, weddings, first communions
and other symbolic events that mark the changes of cycles of reality. These
photographs of anonymous origin are the result of the artist’s drifts through old
bookstores in the Historic Center of Mexico City. To this context, she integrates the
presence of young models on whose bodies, a third image is revealed, one that runs
between memory and the present, provoking a state of ambiguity facing the future.
Altogether, these three planes in the oil paintings produce their own certainty, giving
contemporary portraiture a renewed permanence.
The flux between memory, the present and the uncertainty of the future in the
images of Elena Manero provoke us, leave us with the feeling of inhabiting a world that
just hasn’t happened yet, where otherness exists in a contingent state.
Curator: Jeannette Betancourt
Mexico City, Mexico.
