Esteban Ismael Durán combines textile, tin in a startlingly contemporary way

SANTA FE — Shiny, low-relief animals and icons made from hammered tin contrast with vibrant horizontal-striped serape textile backgrounds in Esteban Ismael Durán’s solo exhibition, “Tales of Memories and Transformation” at El Zaguán. Although people have been weaving serape blankets and making hammered tin crafts since the 19th century, I don’t think anyone has ever combined the two in such a startlingly contemporary way.

I love a good figure-ground contrast, and it doesn’t get more contrasty than bright-colored textiles and unpainted tin. “Angels in the Sky, Take Me Home” and “A Prayer for the Bees” feature tin birds and bees, which, like lead Zeppelins, defy the laws of physics. Meanwhile, the ironically titled “A Prayer for Rain” features a grid of fish in an underwater scene. Durán’s colorless mirrored figures are like memories of nature from a thoroughly denatured future — cleaner and more attractive than real fish, birds and bees, but more unsettling — like robotic chrome replicants.

Although Durán’s compositions are slightly asymmetrical, the figures still snap to an unseen minimalist grid, betraying a strong graphic design sensibility. One piece, with a Greek cross floating above a buck's antlered head, even looks like the Jägermeister logo. The stylistic affinity with advertising and graphic design puts Durán’s work in conversation with post-internet art, including Matt Belk's and Petra Cortright's anti-naturalistic landscape paintings. And his custom-made frames, with their elaborate tin work, reinforce the works' decorative, anti-illusionist qualities.

Durán takes traditional Mexican textiles, ubiquitous here in the Southwest, and combines them with his own expert-level tinsmithing work to make art that doesn’t look traditional at all. It's like how Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian used her knowledge of Persian cut-glass mosaic work to make very non-traditional op art pieces. Because Durán's materials and techniques have such deep roots in our region, his work does not look out of place in historic New Mexican interiors — including El Zaguán itself — yet his aesthetic remains unapologetically contemporary.

The serape textiles' gradated stripes resemble 16-bit Sega Genesis gradients. We read them as horizon lines, but with so many horizons stacked on top of each other, Durán's landscapes look like glitching computer screens.

In works like “The Center of My Universe” and “Snake Spirits,” where the tin figures have such a strong vertical orientation but are also wavy and off-kilter, their juxtaposition against the even, measured horizontal stripes below gives the illusion of moving cross-currents.

In this review, I have made only passing reference to the angels, prayers, third eyes and other spiritual themes and motifs “Tales of Memory and Transformation” is ostensibly about, namely because the tactile materiality is what impressed me, not the purported immateriality.

There's other spiritually-motivated art that I love on a purely visual level — Stephen Mueller’s late works, for instance, when he was painting bright, flat, graphic shapes on faux tie-dye backgrounds.

I’m also a fan of Fra Angelico — not because I get any particularly strong religious feelings from his art, but because, in paintings like “The Beheading of Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian,” he depicts halos as hard metal objects, such that even when they’ve been detached from their bodies, the haloed heads roll around like coins.

I like Durán’s art for similar reasons. He’s a master of materiality who pushes his nature scenes to the point of unreality. Is there a spiritual dimension beyond his textured surfaces? Perhaps. But here on the physical side of things, they’re great fun to look at.

Esteban Ismael Durán combines textile, tin in a startlingly contemporary way with 'Tales of Memories and Transformation'

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