José Arnaud Bello (Oaxaca, Mexico 1976) presents his first individual exhibition at Galería OMR, titled De Paredes y Montañas. This presents works carried out between 2008 and 2011 based on the use of disciplines and fields of knowledge to understand and act transversally in certain artificial and natural contexts, which are selected by the artist based on their sculptural and discursive possibilities.

Thus, architecture, mathematics, sociology, epistemology and even geology become part of an investigation undertaken by the artist, who is dedicated to identifying phenomena and manipulating processes, sometimes imperceptible, that are activated when a certain way of thinking or understanding the world is found with a material or an appropriate environmental condition (Poiesis), using formal strategies that are documented in photographs, drawings and texts.Arnaud Bello's work is based on making subtle variations in the representation of specific facts or situations.

The work presented here is divided into two series or bodies of work: Recursive tautologies and Works in the channel. The first consists of using tautological statements to produce a recurring visual relationship between form and its execution, exploring transitions between dichotomies that go from the material to the linguistic, such as the change from a text to a volume or the migration of a object to a concept.

The second series investigates the intersection between social phenomena and natural processes that occur in the Pance River, in Cali, Colombia, a recreational place where people gather on weekends. A common pastime among visitors is moving stones to, for example, prepare places to sit with the family or build small dams by piling stones in the riverbed to contain the flow.      

The method undertaken by Arnaud, based on observing and adapting nature, produced Works in the Riverbed, a series of iterative projects in which some river stones are rearranged, adapted, transformed, intervened with phrases, marked, measured, studied, recorded photographically and later returned to the channel, in a research exercise on the scale and organization of the landscape that constantly activates and reinvents its previous premises, related to the precedents of Land Art and specifically with artists such as Robert Smithson or Richard Long. Of walls and mountains by José Arnaud Bello is an exercise on persistence, which uses various formal and discursive strategies to transform the subtle into a vestige of social interaction, into a detailed archeology of nature. In the context of this exhibition, actions become important because they are part of a complex narrative about a particular condition of making and thinking form; converting the OMR gallery space into a neutral place, a tabula rasa devoid of meaning, occupied by walls and mountains where memory and matter meet, through artistic practice, to denote events that would undoubtedly go unnoticed.