The exhibition Archivo J. R. Plaza brings together, for the first time, the works created by artist Iñaki Bonillas (Mexico City, 1981) since 2003, based on the different uses he has given to the mainly photographic archive that he inherited from his maternal grandfather, José María Rodríguez Plaza, an amateur photographer who took up the curious task of making almost endless portraits of himself, in addition to busying himself with bringing the visual history of his family together – an undertaking spanning more than a half-century of images carefully grouped into 30 folders and quite a few boxes of slides.

This is rich material that Bonillas has managed to submit to a wide range of operations over the years – embedded in a constant generative logic of splitting – that has allowed him to combine elements that initially seem incompatible: on one hand, a personal, biographical narrative made of anecdotes and notes of a rather private nature; and on the other hand, a systematising urge – undoubtedly inspired by the first conceptual practices, of which Bonillas has been avidly attached – by which he manages to give the appearance of methodical neutrality to all his different approaches to this archive, whose immensity seems to have awakened in him the need to explore the possibility of perhaps exhausting all their combinations, apparently inextinguishable so far.

It is this sense of meticulously accumulated time that brought Bonillas to delve into a combinatory kind of art, of which the 20 works shown here have sprung. Thus, the exhibition offers a unique opportunity to get closer to the full spectrum of Bonillas’ investigations with J. R. Plaza Archive.