Hilario Galguera Gallery is pleased to present Memo, a solo exhibition by Belgian artist Willem Boel (b. 1983). The show brings together a selection of series spanning over fifteen years of pictorial research by the artist, also known as “Memo”—a nickname he acquired during a stay in Mexico, which has since become a conceptual symbol within his most recent work. Far from approaching painting as a practice aimed at producing finished images, Boel’s work unfolds as a system of actions where the pictorial gesture does not function as an end in itself, but rather as a catalyst for an open-ended process, permeated by contingency and indeterminacy. The exhibition will open during GAMA Week in Mexico City, on Thursday, September 4th, and will remain on view during regular gallery hours through October 24th, 2025.

The curatorial axis of the exhibition revolves around the notion of residue: understood not as waste, but as the unintended result of a set of material and temporal operations. Boel proposes a production model that challenges traditional notions of authorship: he introduces deliberate obstacles, limits his own decision-making, and allows external forces—such as weather, the passage of time, or material reactivity—to influence the final configuration of the work. Rather than planning an outcome, the artist focuses on generating the conditions for something to emerge, without fully anticipating the result.

In series such as De nieuwe molens, Reward paintings, or Split paintings, this methodology translates into the patient accumulation of pictorial layers, the indirect documentation of color use, or the experimentation with continuously rotating supports. Each gesture is in service of time and randomness. In other series like Planetas or Pare Feu, matter itself takes center stage: paper oxidizes slowly in contact with metal structures, or paint is poured and left to solidify mid-air, defying the conventions of the pictorial plane.

In the Memo series, the conceptual core of the exhibition, Boel replaces wooden panels with metal grids, emphasizing the hybrid nature of his work between the two-dimensional and the sculptural. The process here is the opposite of accumulation: the goal is no longer to build up layers, but rather to gradually close the empty spaces within the grid. In this contained and repetitive gesture—akin to a devotional act—the artist works exclusively on one side of the grid. The reverse, untouched by conscious intervention, becomes an autonomous surface: a residue in the strictest sense, where paint takes on unforeseen forms, directly resulting from previous actions but without being intentionally directed.

The exhibition thus offers a critical reconsideration of painting’s role in contemporary art: not as a retinal device or a finished form, but as an expanded field of material, poetic, and conceptual operations. Boel’s work outlines a practice in which the image is not produced but discovered; where residue is not discarded, but valued as an aesthetic truth. In its apparent passivity, residue reveals the power of the unintentional: something the will cannot manufacture, but can allow.

WIllem Boel - Memo will be open to the public from September 5th to October 24th, 2025, at the gallery’s San Rafael space.