Héctor de Anda's painting is based upon one of art's great paradigms: the principle of the plane. Surface has been the nucleus of painting from its most remote manifestations, and will remain thus as long as we continue to rely on its structural support. The plane is to painting what volume is to sculpture; and despite the alterations suffered by this core principle through the incorporation of perspective and the great experiments of the 20 th century, we cannot help but think of painting—in its most rotund and elementary expression—as a colored surface.

Héctor de Anda starts off from the plane dividing the surfaces in a grid that he then proceeds to work with color. The planes chosen are sometimes monochromatic with subtle hues of neuter shades while others display brightly colored applications. In both cases though his paintings appear before us as a visual whole seemingly impossible to grasp. Pure painting representing itself. Painting as homage to Paul Klee's exercises and Mondrian and Van Doesburg's experiments in neoplasticism.

Visual asceticism—apparently devoid of anecdotic details—is broken as we begin to perceive the tactile elements. There are delicate textures where signs and words can be discerned and writing differentiating each section without hindering the unity of the fragments. Another kind of movement that generated by an optical effect where planes contract and expand as in a game of systole and diastole is also detected.

One of the artist's preoccupations is memory, a characteristic that, among many others, makes us human. The incessant flux of memory is imprinted in those notes as if through automatic writing, that old surrealist resource probably best displayed in the large paintings of abstract expressionism. His work is the infinite territory for a gaze that only perceives the fragment of a whole whose extension is impossible to tell. The fact that these reticular surfaces can evoke memory shouldn't surprise us. Just how many infinite extensions are hidden from us, lost in the meanders of that interior universe? A thought or a memory can be, inside that logic, only small visible particle, or to use the recurring metaphor, the tip of the iceberg.

The other aspect of Hector's work is his sculptures—a series of modules made from such noble materials as onyx and obsidian. Repetition and accumulation of fragments is, like in painting, the starting point. Yet, in the case of the sculptures—where organic elements and forms with clear totemic references are evident—the final result is different. If, through its reference to memory, his painting is an invitation to take the plunge inside us—as expressed by Huidobro in his seminal poem Altazor —, his sculpture evokes gregarious thought and the memory of the sacred matrix found at the foundation of every culture.

Ernesto Sosa