Susana Wald & Ludwig Zeller at Parallel Oaxaca

Artists: Susana Wald & Ludwig Zeller

Exhibition title: Mirages

Venue: Parallel Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico

Date: April 13 – May 17, 2024

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Parallel Oaxaca

Parallel Oaxaca is pleased to present a selection of historical collaborative works by Susana Wald (Budapest, 1937) and Ludwig Zeller (Rio Loa, Calama, Chile 1927 – Huayapam, Oaxaca 2019).

Mirages, the collaborative works created by Wald and Zeller were created in resonance with their surrealist publishing house Oasis Publications, which they maintained since 1974, after relocating to Toronto, Canada from Santiago Chile.

Wald and Zeller’s Mirages dream forgotten landscapes that converge at diverse temporalities, characters who accept desire emerging from inert structures,machinery or bones. As an athmospheric illusion that reflects far away things as if in a landscaped of water, the Mirages series overflow graphic and pictorial gesturalities alongside cut-outs of old illustrations, evoking transitions between bodies and the visions that contain them.

Echoing enigmatic colossal landscapes scattered in the desert of Atacama, Chile the Mirages came into being through the cutting of their elements out of old illustrations which Zeller selected from publications before 1880, organized in another light via the structure of a collage the poet Zeller composed characters through fragments, semi-automatic, semi-conscious, the collages frequently happened in several days, sounding, digressing in endlessly contemplation, up to the moment when an image surged from the deep within, sudden, absolute and real, Susana Wald spatially positioned them, reinterpreting their setting through their juxtaposition between diverse realities, generated complements, movements and poetic journeys.

Impossible machinery, trees from the depths, pieces of clothing from forgotten bones, the Mirages by Susana Wald and Ludwig Zeller combined the interests from both artists, creating as a third entity; their accomplished surrealist methodology gathered, bones, lifeless structures unless the eyes of the onlooker experiences distances and desires. Perceptions that meet in time and space between gaps and abysses, between consciousness and invisibility.