Text by Christian Barragán

Chris Doyle (Pennsylvania, 1959) is an artist whose work, for more than thirty years, has been characterized by his large-scale and long-term projects in which he uses a hybridization of analogue and digital technologies, shifting of public and private spaces, engagement with diverse historical, social and environmental contexts, as well as a constant research into the history of art. From these central axes in his practice, Doyle created the mural painting project ‘Studio Rotation’, which was developed during two phases corresponding to the research and production periods of the residencies Cave Paintings in Mexico City and Reach Projects in Blue Hill, Maine between 2023 and 2024.

Initially attracted by Isamu Noguchi's high-relief mural in polychrome cement carved on brick in the Abelardo L. Rodriguez public market, ‘History of Mexico’ (1935-1936), Doyle then focused his activity on the Noguchi Garden Museum in Queens, once Noguchi's studio. Designed in the manner of a palimpsest and executed sequentially on a single wall, Doyle painted twelve murals of interior and exterior views of the studio garden museum. At the conclusion of this monumental task, the final mural was detached. In addition to this remnant, the artist documented in photography (perhaps another trace, albeit digital) the twelve views and assembled with them a multimedia animation that recreates Noguchi's studio garden museum in motion.

Afterwards, Doyle then recreated a fragment of the models painted by David Alfaro Siqueiros in his studio house on Tres Picos Street in Mexico City, which is now the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros museum. The section chosen by Doyle corresponds to the spatial composition Siqueiros sketched for the mural ‘The March of Humanity’, one of the masterpieces of Mexican muralism. On this contemporary version of Siqueiros's mural, in which many of his plastic experiments are synthesised and where he integrated painting with sculpture and architecture, Doyle incorporated an optical experience by generating in real time an animation made with the technique of the barrier grid, known as kinegram.This work was also detached and moved to op.cit (1) to be exhibited together with the rest of the project.

At this point in the process of ‘Studio Rotation’, the question arises: what would painting be like if it were treated as sculpture? Or even more: what would painting be like if it were treated as sculpting in space? In the first case, relief and spatial projection could be considered as an approximation towards a possible answer, and in this sense, the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros could be approached as an attempt at transition between one dimension and the other. In the second case, the action of transferring a painting from its context to another site becomes an exercise in abstraction both for the work itself and for the spaces that contain it. It happens then that content and container are mutually transfigured and the friction of states opens up a virtual potential in which painting, sculpture, architecture and public space migrate their centres of rotation indefinitely and constantly.

Derived from all this and in conversation with Noguchi's concepts of ‘sculpture of spaces’ and Siqueiros's ‘sculpture-painting’ and ‘plastic integration’, Chris Doyle's project establishes a path of transit towards a mural painting that contemplates (in addition to the traditional two and three dimensions of painting and sculpture, respectively) a virtual space in which the analogue and the digital, the past and the present, figuration and abstraction, static and mobile coexist indistinctly alongside the assemblage between macrohistory and microhistory, as well as notions of individual and collaborative authorship.