Gallery Bogart bridges the international arts scene by rep’ing artist Héctor Dorantes at Mexico City Art Week

Héctor Dorantes creates art through a variety of mediums, such as photography, painting, sculpture and installation. // Courtesy of Gallery Bogart.

In the game of making it as a young professional artist, players grapple to solidify their spots in their communities and gain recognition for their work. Certain players succeed, such as Héctor Dorantes, a 27 year old artist whose work is being represented by a Kansas City gallery in internationally recognized art fair Salón ACME as he explores themes of chaos and maximalism. 

Gallery Bogart has been given the huge honor to represent him at this contemporary art event during Mexico City Art Week, and is the only midwest gallery selected to participate. This is a huge honor, as artists and galleries from all over the world have annually battled to earn a spot at this event since 2013. 

As he explores painting, photography, sculpture and installation, Dorantes produces a wide range of multi-medium works that go from feeling like you’re running through a flower field on shrooms, to shielding yourself from patio furniture that’s seemingly melting above your head. Both ends of the spectrum end up leaving you feeling like you just entered a state of drug induced psychosis. 

“I have been inspired by Colombian magic, labyrinth and basically the use of relative momentum to experience reality differently,” he said. His inspiration also includes surrealist art that has roots in the midwest, citing the film adaptation of William Burroughs’s book Naked Lunch, a surrealist cult classic that follows the protagonist as he essentially loses his mind on an insecticide induced trip. Sound familiar? 

Some of his work looks how I’d imagine if the insides of my brain were to be slapped onto a canvas: jumbled, chaotic, anxiety-inducing, pure anarchy. It embodies mental fragments being pieced together alongside incomplete thoughts; the likes of an ADHD brain. Yet, they’re so vibrant and youthful in nature, with the color saturation being like that of a childhood memory.

Héctor Dorantes, Romanticization of Dead City Flowers #3, 2023
Plumón sobre fotografía, 38 x 28 cm (15 x 11 in), Edition 3/5. // Courtesy of Gallery Bogart.

My favorite example of this is Romanticization of Dead City Flowers, a maximalist multi-medium piece that really embodies incomplete thoughts and childhood memories. It’s striking to me mostly because like bees, I’m simple, and am quick to flock to anything with color. Yet when searching deeper, it is also because this could be an idealized version of how experiencing the world as a child would look like on a canvas to me. It’s brilliant. 

Contrasting his lighter creations, the warmth of his more heavier-feeling works is dimmed to the point that it borders on eerie; it holds a certain weight that I’ve only felt when watching found footage. Darker in nature, his work in these combined mediums takes on a different persona, an alter ego almost, as it descends from vibrant collages of chaos into pieces that feel like they came from a grave alternate reality. 

INSTALACIÓN TOTAL NO. 4: RIZOMA D’ATELIER NATURALEZA MUERTA, DELIRIO EN CHAPINERO // Courtesy of Gallery Bogart.

Dorantes’ multi-medium approach takes time, as he opts to switch between mediums during his work process to make sure he doesn’t lose interest. “I have some series that I have been working on since 2020 and 2022, and they’re still being developed,” he said. “I can’t do something continuously for a long time, because either I get bored or I start to lose perception; like the scope of it. So I need to work in small parts simultaneously across different mediums.”

As he prepares for Salón ACME, so does Miller Bogart, founder of Gallery Bogart. Gallery Bogart is an exhibition space for emerging and established contemporary artists, located in the West Bottoms. The gallery focuses on primarily Latin American art, with the intention of bringing skilled Latin American artists to the metro and increasing the exposure that Latin American art receives on a global scale. 

After debuting his creations at Salón ACME, Miller Bogart will begin the process of preparing Dorantes’s and other latin artist’s work to be displayed in a group exhibition titled One Bedroom Apartment, which opens on March 1. One Bedroom Apartment examines the quiet yet profound impact of intimate-scale art and its role in personal spaces.