Get Dirty (2021) by Mateo López is a mixed-media collage combining graphite, colored pencil, ink, and collage elements on paper. Created during a period of social unrest in Colombia, the work reflects López’s engagement with themes of political tension, resistance, and urban life. Through layered textures and fragmented imagery, the piece evokes the complexity and grit of contemporary struggles while challenging traditional notions of drawing and representation.

Cleanse (2021) by Mateo López is a mixed-media collage combining graphite, colored pencil, ink, and collage elements on paper. Created during a period of social unrest in Colombia, the work reflects López’s engagement with themes of political tension, resistance, and urban life. Through layered textures and fragmented imagery, the piece evokes the complexity and grit of contemporary struggles while challenging traditional notions of drawing and representation.

In this work two paper circles are made to intersect and take a form reminiscent of a helix. They are anchored by a wooden half-sphere which serves as its base but also allows it to rotate and wobble. Helix continues López’ ongoing exploration into the ways in which lines on a flat surface can transform into objects with depth and volume.

Hope and Despair (Masks) builds on the cutout collaging process central to López’ practice. Here the collage itself transformed and is lifted into the 3 dimensional plane in the form a mask or as the artist describes it “a second skin”. The mask invites viewers to think of themselves as performers in the world, wearing different masks in a quest to find a balance between hope and despair.

In Doodles (2020), drawing gains materiality and becomes three dimensional. López uses metal wire, Balsa wood and enamel paint to arrive at an object that is playful, and thereby reveals a component of the process of his studio.

The film Disclose takes as its setting off point the twenty-nine collage works presented in the show. Cutouts and fragments from the collage works are digitally rendered with each distinct component moving at its own pace, in conversation with the work’s textual elements. A dancer is filmed interacting with the drawings - a way of bringing performance into the gallery space. The film is scored through an interesting combination of a synthetic sound produced by a professional drum set alongside the soulful sound of the local Tambora drum, creating a melody that is energetic and charged.

Disclose draws from López’ research on theatre, through the work of Russian theatre producer Vsevolod Meyerhold, who focused on learning gestures and movements as a way of expressing emotion outwardly. Meyerhold sought to connect bodily expressions with specific emotions and popularized principles of biomechanics which proposed that the performer’s psychological state was inextricably linked to their physiological state.