FIFTY24SF Gallery, in association with Upper Playground, is pleased to announce Corazón Sangrante (Bleeding Heart), an exhibition featuring new works from Mexico City-based fine artist, Saner. After showing at our sister gallery, FIFTY24MX in Mexico City, this will be Saner’s first exhibition in our San Francisco space. The exhibition opens March 16, 2011.

Saner is a leading member of contemporary muralists and fine artists working in both Latin America and Europe. His mural work has been inspired by the Mexican Muralist Movement and David Siqueiros, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Diego Rivera. For this exhibition, Saner will be presenting new paintings and drawings on paper, featuring his signature animal and human hybrid characters. His fine artwork is inspired and informed by research into Mexican custom and folklore, mysticism, masks, and skulls. The character’s most basic rituals are laid bare in each painting, allowing the viewer to see inside Saner’s personal symbology. As written by FIFTY24MX curator Liliana Carpinteyro, Saner’s “free and unpretentious spirit allows him to express a new Mexican vision.”

Saner (Edgar Flores) titled this exhibition “Corazón Sangrante” (Bleeding Heart), while reflecting on the things he saw around him: violence, anger, happiness, anxiety, and fear. Saner says these are the issues that most Mexicans deal with as part of a daily ration of “food”: junk food that is “consuming the body of a society that is getting closer to it’s destruction, unless the blood warriors awake,” he says.

Using the contrasts of lights-shadows and light-darkness, Saner reflects the eternal battle of men, his images referring to that absurd struggle of daily survival, exposing chaos as the background for resurrection. Those who see their reflection in these images will be reunited with the impossible dream, a utopia of mirrors that nobody wants to recognize and to which all escaped. Why change if the tide has not affected us yet?