In his work, Erick Beltrán constantly researches and reflects upon the structural mechanisms of systems, especially those regarding power relations between the editing process and the construction of the discourse. Through diagrams, information compilations, archives and media inserts, he looks at the way images are defined, valued, ordered, classified, selected, reproduced, and distributed in order to create political, economical and cultural discourses in contemporary society.

 

He also reflects upon how the figure of the editor defines our world, as well as power relations among diverse groups of people. Through a working process of organic evolution, he pours these concerns into the creation of systems and diagrams as a way to catalogue a determined universe, as well as to create collections of seemingly random objects.

 

His projects include Effet Avalanche / Avalanche Effect (2007), where Beltrán started with a revision of day-to-day language and extracted every racist overtone, negative attitude or power structure sample. These sentences became slogans, which were then printed on posters placed on urban structures. These ordinary statements produced a cataclysm for confronting the spectator with something that happens day-to-day, but that one is not aware of in a conscious way.

 

Strategy / Constrategy (2010) consisted of a war-planning table presented as a board game. All the characters were taken from newspaper photographs. The audience was able to add more characters depending on how current events developed. The works became an attempt to diagram social reality, or our political subconscious. The imposed interpretations of the participant created inner battles that reflect in endless mirror images.

 

Atlas Elodion (2014) analyzes and represents the tradition of thought that explains the relations of the universe through images. By creating a combination of images it is possible to discern the underlying orders in the world and, in this case, the collective psyche of a country. Beltrán created a catalogue of icons related to ideological baggage in order to make visual the memory of Mexican society and to question why some images appear as reoccurring nightmares establishing themselves in the present and creating the impression of an immovable reality.


Francisco Ramírez #5, Col. Daniel Garza,
Del. Miguel Hidalgo 11830, México D.F.
www.labor.org.mx