Cecilia Barreto

Portfolio
(Mexico City, 1985) Visual artist.
Lives and works in Mexico City.

Visual artist with a MFA Degree at Faculty of Arts and Design (FAD-UNAM).In her artistic research projects she develops narratives of recent events.
Selected in the 14 Havana International Biennial future and contemporaneity (2021- 2022). Selected resident in the Casa Wabi artistic residency program
(2020) curated by Paola Jasso, and in the Chambre Blanche international residency program (2019 - FONCA / CALQ).

Ingress to the National System of Art Creators SNCA 2021 emission. She was a fellow of the BBVA Bancomer-MACG program (2016). In the same year
she won first place in the 2nd edition of the Parametro Arte Lumen contest. She was fellow of the 3rd edition of Adidas Border grant. In 2009 she was
beneficiary of the Young Creators Program grant (FONCA, Secretary of Culture). She was selected in the XVIII and XV editions of the Rufino Tamayo Biennial
of Painting and Honorable Mention in the Eighth National Biennial of Painting and engraving ‘Alfredo Zalce’ (2011).

She has five solo exhibitions: “ Cielo Abierto”, Archivo Colectivo Gallery (Mexico City, 2021),“Hyperobjects” at La Chambre Blanche (Quebec City, 2019),
Happy markets at Luis Adelantado Gallery (Mexico City, 2016), “Diagrama de la interferencia” at the Painting, Sculpture, and Engraving School “La
Esmeralda” (Mexico City, 2012) and “Visualidad simultánea” at José María Velasco Gallery, (México City/Museum, 2012).

She has participated in more than 70 collective exhibitions as “El cordón umbilical retiniano” (FESPAC/ foundation, Mexico City, 2018), “Pintura reactiva”
Carrillo Gil (Mexico City/Museum, 2018), “Modos de ver” Carrillo Gil , (Mexico City/Museum, 2018), “Fábulas sin moraleja. el desbordamiento de la
corrupción en México” (Casa del Lago Juan José Arreola-UNAM, Mexico City/Museum, 2017), “Notas para una educación (económico-) sentimental”
Museo Universitario del Chopo UNAM, (Mexico City/ Museum, 2017,) “Parámetro 02”, Museo de la Ciudad de México ( Mexico City/ Museum, 2016),
“El futuro no está escrito” Palazzo Cinni, (Venice Italy, Within the oficial program 56 Esposizione Internazionale d’ Arte de Venecia, 2015) and “Yo sé que
tu padre no entiende mi lenguaje modelno” MUAC-UNAM, (Mexico City/ Museum, 2014).

Bio
Statement

My work consists of drawings, installations and mainly painting. I think about the relationship of painting based on the internet age, I establish a screen-
frame symbiosis. In painting I find a way to slow down the experience of cryptic information through a screen. I represent the graphic illusion of the
sharpness and clarity with which the information is organized, to reverse it and exhibit the rottenness of the institutions.

I am currently researching the mineral extraction process of companies that have mining concessions in Mexico. Open pit as a topic of discussion is
the issue of foreign companies that have bids in Mexico, mostly Canadians and Americans, such as Grupo México, the ninth company with the fewest
ethics according to the Covalence Ethical Group. The pieces are landscapes of the time of a descriptive and analytical nature that no longer allude to
contemplation but to the abstraction of a panorama devastated by ruin.
For her first solo exhibition at Archivo Colectivo, Cecilia Barreto shows part of her latest body of work that derives from the constant search for the
representation of power, economic exchanges, and analysis of financial data.
Through research on the distribution of mining concessions in the national territory to foreign and national companies, their different locations, profits, and
percentages of extraction, Barreto abstractly re-creates the landscape, re-generates the territory.
It shows us a smooth representation, full of light and tones that refer to a clear sky. We can imagine a wide landscape where we find traces of multiple
layers, movement, and at the same time subtraction and emptiness. The elements that she uses for the construction of these new representations of the
territory are freely accessible data, through veiled transparency.
All that data normally displayed on screens becomes the object to be represented, confronting the painting with questioning about its scope of
representation, its limits, and references.
This body of work was made using acrylics with brushes and spread with compressor, alternating the integration of the paint between the manual
sensation and that made by the most industrial machine. A result is a hybrid form of rendering that talks about slowing down the information found on
screens.
Mining in Mexico has been a source of wealth since colonial times and in the last twenty years has regained greater strength. Mining companies, mostly
foreign, have interests in half of the national territory. Since the reform of the Mining Law of 1993, of the almost 200 million hectares total in the
country, about 98 million hectares, are distributed among different companies, with this they have brought ecological problems, social mobilization, and
precariousness to a significant number of localities.
It is undeniable that today’s world requires such an industry, for example in the screens and batteries we use every day. The paint itself uses minerals for
its pigments.
The work of Cecilia Barreto questions the medium in several ways, both painting, digitality, and mining. Cecilia paints by rethinking technological resources,
the reflections of screens, the accumulation of data, and its abstract deployment.
In Cielo Abierto, we see landscapes, which are not direct images of territory, but the interpretation and accumulation of data from the extraction of some
specific site, representations of hollowness, exponential figures, the record of profits.
Contrary to what happens with the graphs and statistics that are normally analytical, descriptive, and closed, in Barreto’s work we see them resignified
with a high critical, political, and questioning load of coloniality. An exercise in thinking about painting beyond it, where layers of information overlap to
generate abstract landscapes that speak of real landscapes within the country, of the emptiness generated by an extraction.

Cielo abierto
Open pit
This is an exhibition about landscape but also about the forms of power over the territory, about the invisible transaction that happens between the
operation of a mining company that destroys the territory, co-opts lands, materials, resources, cheap labor and transforms into profit, into money, which is
represented in numbers that generate metrics of that profit, what we see in the paintings of Cielo Abierto is a representation of that capital, the game of
abstraction of money and territory.
As well as the tension between screen-frame that resignifies the idea about painting.
Although we see graphs with exact and closed numbers, within the paintings we also find movement, the movement of the earth from one side to the
other, the upward movement of capital, and the movement of daily valuations due to that exchange of capital.
Is this a new form of the genre of landscape painting, we could even talk about historical painting, where we do not see the battles and the heroes, but
the numbers of those who have gained more over the territory, or the battles lost to the alignments of access or fractures of the earth through which the
material is stolen? Could we call it a geological painting?
Cecilia Barreto presents us with an imaginary space that is nowhere to be found, she finds it between the duality of what happens between an empty hole
in dialogue with the blue of the sky as if there were a two-headed mirror that reflected up and down equally, showing two realities, the open sky, as those
mining exploitations are known, which develop on the surface of the ground, unlike the underground or drilling mine and the celestial vault. Interestingly,
from this type of mining, they steal especially gold, lithium, silver, rhodium, and platinum. Minerals are used in the production of electronic devices,
screens, and significant amounts for the gold reserves of banking institutions.
This body of work is a continuation of a work that represents the denunciation, although it seems that the protest is not there, within the abstraction we
find that power, which tells a story, which describes the landscape that is no longer and re-updates it in a landscape-reflection that speaks of that space
that turns the interior into the exterior, a mirror that amplifies the space, opens it.
Donna Haraway says that you must go to the ruined places, not to name the disaster, but to generate, to do things in common in those same territories.
Cecilia Barreto gives us a new way of seeing the territory so that we do not forget it, so that it is not empty.
Everybody knows 26
150cm diameter
2023
Acrylic on canvas
Everybody knows 27
160 diameter
translucent candy enamel on mirror, wooden frame
2023
Everybody knows 12
150 diameter
translucent candy enamel on mirror, wooden frame
2021
Everybody knows 4
140 x 200 cm
Acrylic on canvas
2021
Everybody knows 3
30 diameter
Acrylic, silver point on canvas
2020
Everybody knows 5
150 diameter
Acrylic on canvas
2021
Everybody knows 4
101 x 124 cm
Acrylic on canvas
2021
Everybody knows 28
100 X 150 cm
Enamel on canvas
2023
Everybody knows 28
100 X 150 cm
Enamel on canvas
2023
Everybody knows 10.1 / 10.2
2/ 113 x 169 cm
Acrylic on canvas
2021
Fall in the void

The work that I present is part of a line of research of more than a decade; in which I have reflected on the representation of
contemporary power iconography. I take financial language as inspiration, redefining graphs and flowcharts that correspond to values
such as time, space, shares, bonds, and interest; relating screens, frame, drawing and abstraction of capital.
This installation is a provocation to be part of a critical process, showing power disputes over territories and bodies, where the
landscape is replaced by the accumulation of data from the companies that currently have mining concessions in Mexico, mostly
foreign companies that are on lists of less ethical companies, making it visible that the accumulated wealth is the product of the
exploitation of the territory and the dispossession of natural resources.
Selected
works
PRICELESS
The imaginary of power is sheltered in high security buildings equipped with uninterrupted electricity systems, communication networks and
refrigeration to house thousands of servers that store the accumulated account of human activities, whatever they may be.
Data centers are computer cathedrals, they house an omnipresent power that allows individual behavior to be controlled
and social by possessing the whirlwind of information generated by the conscious and unconscious exchanges of millions of users of virtual
spaces. The huge stained glass windows that ltered the light of divinity have been replaced by sinister lights that icker intermittently emanating
from macro computers. The sublime of human connections is deposited in images and digital words that record an important part of our
exchanges of material, natural, intellectual and, therefore, political resources.

2017
Installation. Corridor, metal grids and oil on canvas
780 x 300 x 220 cm
hyperobject 01
Year: 2018
Mixed media: Acrylic, polymer resin, on canvas
Dimensions: 140 X 200 cm
It’s never enough 33
Year: 2017
Mixed media: low temperature ceramic on wooden pedestal
Dimensions: variable
 It’s never enough 25
Year: 2016
Mixed media: acrylic, polymer resin on canvas
Dimensions: 200 X 200cm
Risk Processes 2
Technique: Embroidered fabric
Year: 2018
3x5m
It’s never enough 3
Year: 2016
Mixed media: Acrylic, polymer resin, on canvas
Dimensions: 140 X 200 cm
 It’s never enough 6
Year: 2016
Mixed media: acrylic, polymer resin on canvas
Dimensions: 200 X 200cm
 It’s never enough 11
Year: 2017
Mixed media: acrylic, polymer resin on canvas
Dimensions: 120 x 320cm
views of Exhibition Happy Markets
at Luis Adelantado Gallery (Mexico City, 2016)
Installation: Mixed media: acrylic, graphite ink spray enamel two paints on the wall Approximate Dimensions ( 5 x 7m2)
Centro Cultural de España en México
Photography by: Gustavo Ruiz Lizarraga

CUT OUT OF STORIES

Cut out of stories is a visual scene which is constructed from selection, painting and assembly of images produced by news agen-
cies that routinely build social narratives and their meanings. Reuters, Associated Press (AP), Agence France Presse (AFP), Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), EFE
are indeed producing organisms that build symbolic actions, “social”, as an area of signi cance in which each player receives their identity and from which social
relations are established.
Of the many images produced and disseminated globally by these news agencies, Cecilia Barreto has selected the ones regarding collective protest actions
which have also been used by the entertainment industry and advertising for being subjected to a series of operations which emphasizes its membership of a
narrative of social con ict. The use of a wall device (which certainly reminds us of the public nature of the images and iconography of murals them- selves) and
the use of painting and drawing to “play” and digital photographic images that has painted the names of agencies, as well as references to the digital context,
allow you to submit the narrative to different visual conditions of an updated pictorial realism ows. Cecilia achieved in this way, propose a suitable framework
for the visual presentation of the social as a result of relations of production and signi cation in which the interests and strategies of var- ious groups and
institutions involved. Thus, assembly, painting and drawing these images -of these stories- cuts, the artist allows us to look at the images as part of a complex
balance of power that involves the relationship between narrative, power and culture.
Blanca Gutiérrez Galindo
http://www.möbius.3
2014
Mixed media: oil, acrylic, spray enamel on canvas Dimensions: 130cm x 170cm