Pedro Montilla: Mirar abajo
Opening Reception
Friday, November 14
5-7pm
Gallery Talk
Saturday, November 15
1pm
moniquemeloche is pleased to present Pedro Montilla: Mirar abajo, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Montilla’s practice unfolds through painting, exploring the medium as a mystical being to understand the experience of being alive. Mirar abajo, which loosely translates to “look below” explores the ground as both a physical and psychological terrain; a mutable surface that holds shadows, mirrors the self, and contains the histories embedded in place.
Montilla was born in the Colombian Andes and moved to Chicago to study at the School of the Art Institute. Having recently graduated with his MFA, he completed a summer fellowship at Ox-Bow in the bucolic landscape of Saugatuck, Michigan. After moving to the U.S., the ground became a site of questioning: how do we come to understand it when everything feels unfamiliar? In Saugatuck, he absorbed the layered presences and instabilities of the land. The lagoon, a powerful and often unsettling body, became a mirror for solitude, reflection, and the strange doubling of self. Carrying these impressions into the studio, his archetypal spaces stitch together memory and fantasy from fragments, shadows, and echoes.
Montilla’s paintings take root in fique, a coarse Andean fiber used to transport grains across borders. This material–mirroring the artist’s own departure from home–hovers between painting and tapestry. Its porous, open weave allows pigment to slip, seep, and rebel –creating theatrical yet intimate landscapes, scenes, and abstractions. A horizon line hovers above the viewer’s eye level, positioning us perpetually beneath it and becoming one with the shadow. For Montilla, shadows are the protagonists, the sunless, the lightless, and functions as both companion and reflection. It is the threshold between being and place, and a constant presence that mirrors the artist’s movement through displacement, solitude, and belonging. Taken together, Mirar abajo visualizes a tactile and silent language, an allegorical world where the invisible is just as consequential as the seen.