RODRIGO ECHEVERRÍA:
Ontological Sighthound
JO-HS Gallery is pleased to present the newest exhibition Ontological Sighthound by Mexican artist Rodrigo Echeverría (b. 1988) opening in our NYC space on March 20, 2025.
SELECTED ARTWORKS
What remains when something disappears, is missing, or exists only as a delusion in our imagination? How do we engage with the tension between what is no longer present and what continues to vibrate just beyond the threshold of perception? Through an intricate dialogue between philosophy and art, Ontological Sighthound explores experiences that grapple with liminality—where the figure hangs in suspense and the trace resists fading. The works in this exhibition unfold as a journey from idea to perception and viceversa, from sensation to ideation.
The conceptual paintings in this collection are rooted in the experience of the phantom limb—a phantom love, a phantom child, a phantom pain, a phantom self, a phantom scissor, a phantom of you. This phenomenon reveals our corporeal extension through a phenomenological lens, questioning the very boundaries of what constitutes a body. Even a lost love can transform into a body part or delineate the limits of one’s cognition. Where does an amputated body, which insists on extending its anticipated possibilities as a whole, begin? And where does it end? Following thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Echeverría reframes the phantom limb not merely as a sensory or cognitive anomaly, but as a bodily strain between expectation and absence—a bodily echo resonating in its own emptiness. In his paintings, this tension materializes as sketches that both emerge and fade, as structures suggesting unstable presences, and as gestures that probe the permanence of what is no longer there.
The landscape works, born from a patient exercise in observing the horizon, invert the relationship between subject and background by placing the latter in the foreground. The background embraces the painter, forming a surrounding body that integrates with seamless ease. These works do not depict geographical locations but rather existential spaces—places that have ceased, or will cease, to exist in their current form due to the inexorable passage of time. Some appear as ruins, vestiges of past experiences; ephemeral appearances marked by temporal asynchronicity that persist as sketches of a receding world. Here, painting becomes an act of capturing traces of time imprinted on the horizon—a play of light, shadow, color, and vibration that transforms the medium. This endeavor is not rooted in nostalgia or melancholy but in an ongoing inquiry into how what has disappeared continues to shape our existence—and, by extension, the world. Painting does not merely record loss; it summons it, remakes it, and transforms it into a visible body.
The most succinct, minimal gesture propels Echeverría on this journey: the sketch, conceived as a divine spark—a vital force, energy in constant motion—is never merely an inert mark. Like Kandinsky, he regards the line as a language of signals, inviting the viewer to complete what is suggested on the canvas. In landscape painting, the line originates in the visible world, acutely aware of its ephemeral nature. In conceptual painting, however, the line emerges from the void, from consciousness as a generative force. What does the painter achieve in both cases? He momentarily seizes the flurry of lines from disparate dimensional planes and brings them into friction. Once this encounter occurs, it reveals a clue to the origins of the dimensions that Echeverría—a tireless sighthound—relentlessly pursues. Ontological Sighthound invites us to reflect on the nature of perception and on how we construct reality from fragments, traces, and echoes—forms that unveil the phenomenal world. In Echeverría’s work, painting, like an amputated extremity, resists fading away.
Text by Ainhoa Suárez Gómez, Rodrigo Echeverría and Nicklas Quirós.
ABOUT RODRIGO ECHEVERRÍA
