Morán Morán presents Luis Gispert's first exhibition at their Mexico City location, titled Love Like Salt. With six oil paintings and a video installation, the artist expands on the film and photographic work for which he is well known. Gispert’s imagery leans theatrical through his particular approach of revealing cultural iconography in a vivid almost futuristic way, simultaneously seductive and uneasy. Each artwork, regardless of medium, is a visual chapter positing open-ended narratives that resonate as pop-culture elegies.

Love Like Salt provocatively employs heavy symbolism that factors alongside the school of realism in painting, replete with its own history. Through Gispert’s haunting depictions we have the visual connotation inherent with boats on the water (voyage, uncertainty, and wanderlust), themes of ruin, as well as the sinking ship idiom. These paintings undoubtedly suggest a story but there is a good measure left to the imagination as we observe the dramatic destruction or slow demise of different types of boats at various stages of succumbing to nature. However, through all this we can regard these moments frozen midway between the best intention and the worst outcome, left to wonder what it all means and also the exquisiteness of suspended inevitability.

— Morán Morán

Allegra Cordero di Montezemolo, Director of the gallery will give guided tour of the exhibition on Saturday 9 at 2pm, and on the 16th and 23rd of October at 12pm. RSVP

As a species, we have gotten to the point where we can’t enjoy nature without an intervention. We can hardly experience the natural world without one of our human creations to transport us there. We travel to remote places in vehicles: bicycles, motorcycles, cars, trains, airplanes, and now spaceships. It’s a paradox – to receive what nature offers us, we need to rely on machines. This reliance on machines creates a tension between having and letting go. It creates a desire to claim the experience as our own. The truth is that ownership is not possible. The land and the sea will always repossess its territory through natural processes, images being our only lasting way to memorialize these moments – a painting or a camera preserving our memories. These works capture our misguided desire to experience, and own, a piece of nature. The more we progress and penetrate the natural world, the more it will push back. Eventually, we’ll realize that we have to surrender to truly receive.

– Luis Gispert, New York, 2021