Surveying Space
Iván Hoyos Freyre is an artist who creates with intention and serious scrutiny. The lazer-sharp focus of the Mexico-City based photographer’s compositions are indicative of meticulous evaluation towards the underlying details of our environments which inform the themes and concepts central to each individual work. Approaching topics ranging from inhabitants of space and indigenous peoples to questioning the future and far-off landscapes, Hoyos Freyre’s work is consistently bordering the line between familiar and alien.
Part One: Who is Iván Hoyos Freyre?
Who are you as an artist?
“I’m one more being on earth who lives in a constant paradox of being very connected to the world around me while feeling like an alien to the permeating social constructs of my species, something that, looking back while writing this, seemingly motivates me to find answers in life for my own sake and others who may find value in whatever findings I share.“
“Iván Hoyos Freyre (Sonora, Mexico, 1988) is an abstract artist who, from the lens and the curiosity to discover, creates detailed observation images that sensorially appeal to reflection and seek a constant change in perception.
Through his work, Hoyos Freyre invites the viewer to reinterpret the space they inhabit and their interactions with it. His work utilizes the photographic language and explores others such as videography and music production. His training and multidisciplinary experience in creative and art related areas translate into an acute ability to materialize concepts and conceptualize images. Having worked in multiple countries, his view incorporates multiple contextual elements, particularly from our surroundings.
Hoyos Freyre builds abstract representations that, while privileging detail, reveal the richness of what he is portraying. His work is characterized by the subtle exaltation of colors, textures, materials, shapes, lines and geometric expressions.”
What is something art has taught you?
“Resilience, or how to be a salmon.”
What kind of journey are you on?
“I’m looking to be the human I hope we’re meant to be while bringing anyone I can on the ride.”
What is in your artwork that we cannot see?
Dozens to hundreds of layers in an app and in life.
Part Two: Physical & Social
What is your artistic practice?
“With great curiosity for what’s yet to be known, the attentive observation of my surroundings has allowed me to discover the multiple worlds all around that reveal from the constant shaping of my perception. They surround us in mesmerizing forms worth portraying and that is my intent, while the same portrait emphasizes the value in having that great curiosity for the world around us, something that can consequently broaden our understanding of it, reinforce our empathy for its inhabitants and allow us to develop a higher awareness of our relationship with it. Likewise, I consider that an essential and necessary part of my work as an artist and person is to observe and explore beyond my physical environment, which allows these abstractions, so to approach with the same presence our social environment as one more abstraction in the conceptual and reinforce that message which is given full expression in the artworks.“
2019
Photography
100x100cm
The intangible cosmos or ‘That which turns you on is invisible’:
‘Stubborn that who puts a price on time, the outbursts of the spirit and stardust. That what is most valuable cannot be priced. That what cannot be touched is what is kept forever in the soul. That memory is not made of what the senses grasp.’
Telúrico (Telluric):
[tĕ-lo͝or′ĭk]
Of or relating to the earth.
What is housed in a rock? Through the cutting of a stone it is possible to look at a story as old as the planet. The stones, witnesses of time, of life itself, recount in their materiality, in the cracks, colors, mineral formations, shapes and textures, a synthesis of this place we inhabit and to which we belong.
The native peoples, throughout history and the globe, have maintained a search for earthly unity, for understanding this place and those who inhabit it, as part of the same system. This photographic series is situated in the mineral testimony as a metaphor for ancestral values.
Rocks, like the ancestral wisdom of indigenous peoples, are the result of a very long history, and their existence in the bustle of the present is essentially resistance.
2020
Photography
150x225cm
Apatheia:
Finding the Stoics philosophy very relatable and of utter importance, inspiration found me through the virtue of equanimity or what they would call apatheia, the state of mind in which one is free from emotional disturbance, where one can be in total control of one’s response to any circumstance while being in total control of one’s self, standing between the roughness of the textures of life and the peaceful colors of the mind.
2020
Photography
150x225cm
Autopoiético e inconsciente (Autopoietic and oblivious):
Within synergistic bacterial communities, where their different populations unconsciously benefit from each other, an important analogy arises for our own behavior that takes on great relevance in the current global situation; something we could learn on from our microscopic cohabitants.
2019
Photography
120x80cm
Inminencia efímera (Ephemeral imminence):
d=s⋅t
What would happen if we had to leave Earth? If our actions and the irreparability of their effects made this place uninhabitable, where would we go? ‘Inminencia efímera’ is an invitation to imagine possible destinations.
The imminent, what will happen. The ephemeral, that which is as long as it exists and ceases to exist. Both imply promises of future times and evoke, in essence, a warning.
This series features seemingly faraway landscapes, but not distant. In them infinite paradoxes coexist: temporal, spatial, luminous, dimensional. Conjugated in an unknown future time, these landscapes present ambiguous scenarios where desolation, beauty, stars and rocks are as much as the time and space they inhabit. Like the cracks through which the light sneaks, its inhospitable beauty makes present the existential notion that titles the series.
From the spectator-representation dialectic and the distance it allows, these pieces promote a consciousness that operates from the fictitious and perches on the entry and exit of an image. This photographic series glimpses futures from a present in which preventive actions are still possible. As if from the now, the images gave way to futures that are in another time and space.
2019
Photography
100x100cm
Habitante (Inhabitant):
Being in a place isn’t the same as inhabiting it. When a place becomes a habitat, there is an active fusion between the subjects and their surroundings, and the surroundings and their subjects.
This photographic series is stated as a criticism that comes from abstraction; a call to reflect on the effects caused by our social behaviors as inhabitants of this place. As cohabitants, this call extends to us as entities sharing a one and only place.
From metaphors landed in the mineral form, this body of work emphasizes a detailed observation of organic expressions that reveal transformation processes and allow us to mirror human behavior.
The proposal of ‘Habitante’ lies in the influence that we have as humans and hints at the urgency of prioritizing cooperation and humanizing over apathy, transgression and other negative habits.
| Where/ How can Vacant Museum viewers see more of your work and where can they purchase it? |
| On my website: ivanhoyosfreyre.com Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/ivanhoyosfreyre/ |