Raúl Aguilar Canela

D. D. D. D. is pleased to present Please, No More Motivated Bastards, a solo presentation by Montreal-based artist Raúl Aguilar Canela. Featuring a new group of paintings by the artist, this will be the Aguilar Canela’s first solo exhibition in the city.

In many of the show’s paintings, the currents of corporatism and sharp, aggressive shapes of the professional and financial are reformatted as an exaggerated pastiche of themselves. Arrows cut, caress, and engorge themselves in one painting, while lushly painted bars of color recede into an infinity where they will inevitably intersect. Stars, a childish symbol of success, are interlaced with images of the globe, a symbol of the sophisticated jet-setter.

Aguilar Canela is aggressive in his utilizing, satirizing, and exploding of familiar symbolic tropes of success, attainment and acceleration. However, the physical process in which he does so is marked by gentleness. The paintings are slowly made in multiple layers of oil paint, and an agglomeration of small individual strokes coalesce into works that reverberate with deep feeling rather than simple irony. In his process, Aguilar Canela recognizes an oft-cited palliating role of painting, a medium seen as an avenue for respite and healing. The resulting paintings wrestle with the tense relationship between the healing power of art and the forces that need healing in the first place.

Raúl Aguilar Canela (b. 1988) is a Mexican-born artist based in Montreal. His work, bouncing between stylistic constraints and material explorations, reveals a particular interest in heterogeneity in the painting practice as well as a a continuous infatuation towards the history of the discipline. He received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA) in 2021. He holds a BFA from Concordia University (Montréal) in 2014. Aguilar Canela has participated in residency programs at Banff Centre and Est-Nord-Est. His recent solo exhibitions include Purple Vein at L’Oeil de Poisson (2024) in Quebec City, Puple Rain at Diagonale (2024), in Montreal, and Smart like a Sun at Patel Brown (2024), in Toronto. In 2019, his work was selected to be part of the Bienal de Pintura Rufino Tamayo XVIII, in México City.