Celeste is an artist duo comprised by María Fernanda Camarena and Gabriel Rosas Alemán (n.1988, Guadalajara, MX. 1983, Mexico City, MX).
Through the integration of diverse media and disciplines in their practice, Celeste conducts a negotiation that expands concentrically in order to gradually encompass other collaborators and spectators within the workings of an intimate exchange. The exhibition space is transposed by the closeness of daily life creating transient moments of proximity and familiarity, blurring the commonplace structures that define how an artwork must be appreciated or how a museum or a gallery should be used as a space.
The collaborative nature of the artworks manifests as shapes contained in the pictorial field as the outcome of a hybrid and decentered gestuality. Each element implies the search for equilibrium between two distinct postures; this notion of balance is materialized in the mediation found in conversation and dialogue. The resulting assembly maps out a series of dispositions that fluctuate amid polarity and attraction.
An abstract vocabulary inhabits the pictorial and sculptural objects created by Celeste, deriving from a sensibility that understands geometry as a rhythmic expression of inwardness and the exterior world. This vision condenses within the canvas a sequence of archetypical elements ranging from the spherical disposition of celestial bodies, the angularity of the architectural plane and the human body as a principle of scale. Each work becomes a unique exercise of calibration aiming to depict a resonance between symbols; in their chromatic disposition they blend together and overlay.
Considering the exhibition space, Celeste creates paintings in constant expansion that find a certain correspondence with muralism since they coincide in the intention of combining the pictorial with the architectural, but from a dynamic and portable rationale. Instead of pursuing the permanence of a concrete space, these immersive paintings perform the production of an impermanent environment which could function as the stage for a determined action or situation. These pavilions respond to specific congregation circumstances, they invite to take residency in ephemeral terms.
With each exhibition, Celeste assumes a complementary role as a host in order to invite the spectator not only in the sense of contemplation but rather in the involvement with the ceremonial. The concurrence of painting, sculpture and action triggers a breaking point from the mundane and pushes towards an affective participation. In this setting the sensorial and emotional realms are recognized as legitimate sources of knowledge and an experience of hospitality and acknowledgment can take place without restrictions.