Differences in the way Mexico and the United States view freedom rise to the fore in INTERmedio, Luis Felipe Chávez’s solo presentation at Jonathan Carver Moore (runs through September 27). His painting Skin for Bronze. Dolores Park, San Francisco California, Plaza de la liberación, Guadalajara Jalisco (2025) combines the images of two statues dedicated to Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, who began the Mexican Revolution with el Grito de Dolores, an act whose yearly commemoration on September 16 is now known as Mexican Independence Day.
In the piece, Chávez overlays a statue in Guadalajara of the revolutionary with another in San Francisco’s Dolores Park. While the monument in the Bay Area green space looks serene, a hand on his chest, the one in Guadalajara wears a fierce expression, Hidalgo’s hands holding aloft a chain he has broken.
Seeing a revolutionary hero from Mexico was a nice welcome to San Francisco, Chávez says, but the difference in the statues’ expressions struck him.
“The sculpture that we have here in Dolores Park is pretty chill, like, ‘Oh, I did it. Everything is over,’” Chávez told 48hills in his studio at Pacific Felt Factory in the Mission. “The Spanish government cut off this guy’s head [and put it on display to discourage insurgents] like, ‘You started this revolution, so we’re going to kill you. But he’s pretty calm with the hand on his chest, and the one that is in Mexico, he’s breaking the chains, like, ‘No, this is freedom. To be free, we need to be kind of aggressive, we need to scream.’”
Most of the oil paintings in the show feature an image from Mexico and one from the States, like a cathedral in Guadalajara and one in San Jose, California, or the towering Torre Latinoamericana in Mexico City and the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco.
“I’m talking about how different two countries or two places can be, but at the same time, it’s not that different,” Chávez said. “What I’m trying to say is as humans we are part of this world.”
Chávez grew up in a small town in the state of Jalisco. After winning a drawing contest in middle school, his passion for art intensified. He loved drawing bodies, particularly hands and feet.
His family moved to the United States about 10 years ago, but Chávez had already applied to the University of Guadalajara, and when he was accepted, made the decision to stay in Mexico from 2015 to 2020, earning a BFA in visual arts at the affordable university. In the summer, he would go visit his family, working in the fields with his dad and brother in Bakersfield and in factories in Phoenix, Arizona. When he finished his degree, he moved to San Jose to live with his brother.
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Chávez—who has now shown work in Mexico, Palm Springs, and Bakersfield, as well as San Francisco’s Root Division and the San Francisco Art Fair—thinks of the paintings in INTERmedio as a way of describing his experience as an immigrant, with its intersecting images of Mexico and the United States. He says he found it a little challenging to paint buildings and places rather than the human figures that make up a lot of his work, but he enjoyed it and felt it was what he needed to do to express what he wanted.
“What I’m trying to do with this overlap is explain how it feels coming from one place and moving to another one. And in this overlap, I try to create a new place. It can be this internal place that is not physical,” he said. “It can exist inside of us, because we carry with us all these places that we used to live, and we are trying to exist in this new place.”
INTERMEDIO runs through September 27. Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery, SF. More info here. An espisode with Luis Felipe Chávez will be released on Emily Wilson’s podcast “Art is Awesome” on Tue/16.
