anri sala

Featuring a new body of work shown in Mexico for the first time, the artist turns to the al fresco technique—among the most demanding forms of painting—to explore how time inscribes itself in both materials and images. Practiced in Italy since antiquity and perfected during the Renaissance, al fresco involves painting directly onto fresh lime plaster (intonaco) with pigments dissolved in water. Each surface must be completed in sections known as giornate, within a single working day, as the plaster must remain moist throughout the process. Once the painting dries, the pigments fuse permanently with the wall. Sala revives this craft using specially prepared portable supports backed by aluminum honeycomb panels. His works are far from historical re-creations, bringing together seemingly incompatible temporalities: the fleeting and the geological, the digital and the ancient.

The exhibition presents three groups of works. The first, Surface to Air (2023–present), is based on Sala’s photographs of clouds taken through airplane windows, images that sometimes capture the terrain below filtered through shifting atmospheric conditions. Reimagined in fresco, the clouds appear as softly diffused layers of pigment, yielding surfaces that register air and light over ambiguous landscapes. From such an altitude, the land itself slips into abstraction; cities, mountains, and rivers dissolve into lines and swirls glimpsed in transit. Each title cites the exact coordinates where the photographs were taken, situating the works as both portraits of place and records of a fleeting moment.

Into the plaster, Sala embeds fragments of different kinds of marble—Cipollino, Radica, Tartaruga—whose richly veined surfaces echo surrounding brushstrokes while introducing the vast timescales of geology. The inlays serve a dual function: at times they mirror the movement of clouds; at others they interrupt the composition, as if something was lost in the image. Their swirling striations reflect the logic of the clouds while anchoring the works in deep geological time.

The second group of works draws from Renaissance frescoes by artists such as Masaccio, Fra Angelico, and Piero della Francesca. This approach is exemplified by Sala’s Cristo Deriso (2025), which references Fra Angelico’s The Mocking of Christ (c. 1440–42) in the San Marco convent in Florence. In the original, Christ’s calm, blindfolded figure is surrounded by disembodied hands and a head that spits directly in his face, a haunting abstraction of violence. Sala isolates a fragment of this image and employs a color-reversal effect drawn from analog photography. The result is a juxtaposition not only of two media—photography and fresco—but also of their temporal assumptions: the instantaneous and the enduring. These works speak directly to the history of art, not only through the fresco tradition, but also by reflecting on the shifting ways artists, across centuries and within the possibilities of their media, have chosen to depict their subjects.

The third body of work, Tracing Vista, consists of drawings made with ink, graphite powder, and intonaco on perforated and printed paper. To transfer the design onto the plaster, artists traditionally used spolveri—preparatory drawings on thin paper perforated along the outlines of the image. By dusting graphite or charcoal powder through these pinholes, the composition was stenciled onto the wall, providing a guide. These spolveri map the individual day-long sections that compose Surface to Air XXIX (Cipollino/45°18'46"N, 7°16'57"E) (2025), offering a glimpse into the process behind the large fresco. The composition appears as floating fragments, at once autonomous works and traces of the piece from which they extend.

Within the Mexican context, Sala’s frescoes inevitably recall the muralist tradition spearheaded by artists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who inscribed revolutionary ideals onto the walls of public life. In contrast, Sala’s frescoes avoid monumental declarations. While resonant with this legacy, they withdraw from its didacticism, using the same technique to register what is fugitive, unstable, or inverted, as in his fragments of Italian Renaissance works. If Mexican muralism sought to fix history in pigment and plaster, Sala’s frescoes remain open-ended, resisting definitive interpretation. In their layered materiality, they propose that painting can still serve as a form of contemporary archaeology—of vision, memory, and matter itself.