Deterritorialize

Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, Deterritorialize is a presentation of paintings by Esteban Cabeza de Baca in the framework of his residency at SAVVY Contemporary. This intimate work produced from observation at the Berlin Wall serves to deterritorialize and encourage the fall of borders. This context serves to imagine future landscapes of the artist's hometown in the US-Mexico borderland of San Ysidro, California and Tijuana. The work imagines what de-territorialized spaces look like through multispecies revitalization. The paintings observe native plants, critters and spliced species that guide philosophical life practices of survival in the age of environmental collapse.

Inspired by plein-aire painters like Lois Dodd to Ann Craven the artist draws from the direct process of painting site-specifically. The honesty of the process is of importance revealing the tactile thought process in paint and interaction of the space onto the artist. Light and climate play important roles in the work not as submissive subjects but active collaborators in the work. The history of this practice as a colonial apparatus of surveillance is disarmed by storytelling from the cracks in multiple historical moments.

Another important influence is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s NOMAD Manifesto. This text in addition to Jaune’s oeuvre inspires through an art practice that advocates for Indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice. For Cabeza de Baca, artists like Ana Mendieta with advocacy for the Earth is of the utmost inspiration. The body, space, earth and ephemerality become as a measure of time beyond the corporeal.

The context of Berlin to US/Mexico serves to imagine internationalist perspectives in art making. For the artist, site-specific thinking while embracing globalist concerns is of the utmost importance. Painting is a vehicle for envisioning the world we want as liberation theory and homesick for a world that doesn’t exist. In Deterritorilize, painting imagines the future third world between borders of Nepantla.

Esteban Cabeza de Baca  was born in San Ysidro, CA. He lives and works between Queens, NY and the US Southwest. Cabeza de Baca employs a broad range of painterly techniques, entwining layers of graffiti, landscape, and pre-Columbian pictographs in ways that confound Cartesian single-point perspective. His work is included in the collections of North Dakota Museum of Art, Harvard University, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Parrish Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum and Williams College Museum of Art. Esteban holds an MFA from Columbia University and Rijksakademie, a BFA from The Cooper Union and is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery and Parker Gallery.