PARIS.- Andréhn-Schiptjenko announced the opening of vanitas, José León Cerrillo’s second solo exhibition in Paris.
Cerrillo’s artistic practice interrogates the potential of pure abstraction across a diverse range of media, including printed posters, drawings, diagrams, sculptures, installations, and performance. His work conceptualises abstraction as a process of materialisation that inevitably encounters failure—manifesting as voids, absences, or paradoxes that challenge conventional perceptions of abstract form.
vanitas, featuring sculptures, prints, and large-scale ceramic works, extends Cerrillo’s ongoing exploration of the void as a generative space for abstraction. It presents one instance in a sequence of variations—one ceramic piece, a torso, and a series of lithographs—each engaging with the recurring motif of absence. If the traditional vanitas composition reflects on mortality and the ephemerality of existence, Cerrillo’s vanitas expands this discourse by addressing emptiness not as negation but as a space of possibility. The ineffable void, rather than signifying nothingness, becomes a site for abstraction’s emergence, unbound by fixed conceptual designations.
The large ceramic panels—produced at the renowned Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico—depict an interlinked series of negative spaces, evoking a chain of absences or successive voids. Meanwhile, the concave torsos, turned “inside out”, function as hollow mirror images of the original sculptural form, assuming new identities as fruit bowls, vases, or reflective surfaces. Through this interplay between abstraction and figuration, the work prompts a reconsideration of the process of interpretation and the creation of meaning.
The lithographs composed as still lives, evoke painting, photography and image making, engaging with the conceptual tension between surface adhesion and repulsion. Technically, the process involves hydrophobic techniques: oil-based ink adheres only to the non-wetted areas of the stone, creating an inherent contradiction—achieving the visual effect of liquid splashes, a “wet look”, through a process that inherently resists moisture. Incorporating the motifs from the ceramic works and the torsos, the imagery is initially composed on glass and then scanned before undergoing the lithographic process, where each piece is then “erased” directly on metal plates - while certain images may be repeated, differences in colour and paint application result in distinct and unique outcomes.
José León Cerrillo (b. 1976) lives and works in Mexico City. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Columbia University, both in New York. His work has been included in significant international exhibitions, such as the Okayama Art Summit (curated by Liam Gillick, 2016), the Gwangju Biennale (curated by Maria Lind, 2016), Registro 04 at MARCO Monterrey, Mexico, and The New Museum Triennial (curated by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin, 2015). His practice extends to outdoor sculpture, with permanent installation at the Domaine du Muy in France.
