Daniela Elbahara presents Todas Partes the third individual exhibition of the New York-based painter from the capital, Ricardo González.

This group of paintings represent the shadows, demons or hidden parts of ourselves that are always present, lurking in the background, smiling at us and inviting us to accept their inevitability. They are not necessarily “bad” or “good,” which is why they are sometimes shown in charming or threatening ways, depending on the viewer's judgment or projection.

These “shadows” appear together or alone smiling at the viewer. Sometimes they are completely fragmented, floating like an abstract shape, and other times they manifest in the form of a black cat staring at us. This new set of oil paintings were recently produced in Mexico City. The studio is located near the neighborhood where he grew up and, in a sense, is a re-connection with his early motivations for making art, as well as an encounter with the “shadows” of childhood that might be lurking in his current environment. . The paintings were produced in such a way that the emotive hand is omnipresent in the marks and in the dynamism of the images. In the images there is always a hand or hands as if they want to reach for something or grab it to hold things together.

The richness of oil paint, with its impasto and ever-changing sheen, gives the paintings an empowering charge in which these "shadows" can exist to remind the viewer of their presence. The title explains how these dark entities are within us, we all carry ours and also in a society as a whole, like Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious. These are our impulses, our manias, our desires and motivations coming from the deep dark sea of our being.

Theirs is a journey marked by the questioning of one's own experience, until reaching sovereign laughter, non-knowing and a Presence in no way different from Absence, where the mind moves in a strange world where anguish and sadness coexist.

In The Inner Experience of the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1943)

— Daniela Elbahara