Jorge Méndez Blake is a Mexican born artist that draws connections between literature and the visual arts through assemblage, drawing, and environmental interventions. “I think I tend toward the quotation, rather than toward the creation of new writing,” he says. “I prefer to be quoting others constantly.” He manipulates classic literature by drawing it into the gallery space, assembling pages and quotation into installations, or “canceling” texts by physically entombing them in large wooden boxes. Blake also forms textual chains with works that link the literature of travel and pilgrimage with photographs taken on his travels.
About Jorge Méndez Blake
From the beginning of his career, Jorge Méndez Blake has explored the possible relations between literature and fine arts, and has developed a large body of work with drawings, sound works, sculptures and videos, always referring to the great masters of universal literature, such as William Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges, among many others.
In his work, literature becomes a tool that articulates situations, places and objects where each piece is full of theoretical meanings related to one another.
The visual results from a dialogue with literature, and create complex works that provide a specific form that occurs only in the realm of imagination and desire.
The artist relates classic literature with contemporary architecture and visual arts to perform installations, drawings and interventions based on the notion of “library”, understood not only as a receptor that accumulates knowledge, but as an object with infinite formal possibilities; an institution whose purpose is the preservation of books and the dissemination of knowledge.
The artist sees libraries not as isolated buildings, but as constructions that hold inexhaustible sources of information, and are thus able to create microsystems that address specific issues such as landscape or love. Méndez Blake’s work oscillates between reality and fiction when merging the architecture of places like the Library François Mitterand in Paris, or the Public Library in Seattle, with landscapes –and fragments- of fantastic literature, to become cultural metaphors which meaning expands to different areas of knowledge.
