México, identity and dissociation
Fundación Telefónica has always devoted special attention to Latin American art because of its close relationship with each of the countries in which it has set up the existing Foundations, as we have done in Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Chile and now, very recently, in Mexico.
This is, therefore, the first time Fundación Telefónica is sponsoring a project of this nature: a selection of Mexican artists who are related not only through generational ties, but above all by the variety and diversity of their work, which establishes a certain break with the preceding generations.
The selection made by exhibition organizer María Lluïsa Borràs does not conceal the risk inherent in this approach, a risk she has assumed as a challenge, knowing as she does the vigor and multiplicity of emerging Mexican art, which is very much in tune with the international scene.
I would like to mention those who have made producing this exhibition possible, as well as those —gallery owners and private collectors—who have collaborated on this project by lending many of the works we are presenting. To all of them I convey my heartfelt thanks.
César Alierta, President
Fundación Telefónica
Maria Lluïsa Borràs
Mexico: identity and dissociation
After a generation that strove to free itself from the traditional Mexican stereotype, so indelibly marked by mural painting and by such artists as Rivera, Orozco, Tamayo and Siqueiros, who were considered practically as heroes, in the 1960s a “breakaway” generation appeared that split off from tradition and introduced abstract expressionism into Mexico.
Twenty years later, at the end of the 1980s, Mexican art again enjoyed a fame it had lost since the heyday of the muralists. This resurgence coincided with the drafting and negotiation of the American Free Trade Agreement with the United States, a process that was completed in 1992. The period saw major exhibitions of Mexican work on the international scene. In 1990 New York’s Metropolitan Museum organized a monumental exhibition spanning Mexican art from the pre-Columbian era to the modern age, Paris discovered Frida Kahlo and the Grand Palais brought together the best of Aztec and Mayan art. In 1992, the Frankfurt Book Fair paid homage to Mexican literature.
The painting produced in Mexico during the 80s was realistic in style and traditional in its themes, recovering the country’s indigenous, historic and religious symbols. Teresa Conde baptized this current with the controversial term Neo-Mexicanism. That painting, which bordered on kitsch and was anchored in popular culture, with a pseudo-surrealist taint and a certain nostalgia for the old-fashioned, represented the exaltation of Mexican nationalism. Predictably, its facile exoticism won immediate commercial success, and it was duly exported, not only to the United States, but also to Europe. The arrival of Neo-Mexicanism in Spain was heralded by its repeated appearances in Spain’s annual ARCO art fair, surrounded by a halo of the resurgence of the perennial image of Mexico.
That self-indulgent figuration had, however, the virtue of provoking the rejection of an important part of the new generation of Mexican artists. Quite young at the time, these rebellious creators were, without comprising a group nor representing a specific trend or option, obliged to seek an alternative that would set them apart. They started by questioning the market and the established system by looking for alternative spaces distinct from the galleries. They ended up analyzing the true function of the art of their time while rejecting certain globalizing trends or criteria of international “modernity”. Instead, they examined the questions that concerned them, such as identity and memory, what identity they should build, how to move forward until they achieved a radical change and what ruptures they should undertake.
Because neither the interests nor the problems were the same for all of them, the options were not uniform. This meant that their responses showed great diversity, in terms of both the language used and the strategy or method applied; the approaches ranged from the programmatic to the intuitive. It can by no means be said that these young artists’ radical position was exclusively based on their rejection of successful painting. The situation they faced was much more complex. At that time Mexico City was a gigantic urban agglomeration covering a surface of roughly one million square meters and crossed by many thoroughfares that were, in some cases, longer than 40 kilometers. It was inhabited by 18 million people. Its internal contradictions were prodigious: the country’s greatest fortunes, which were few and well known, coexisted with thousands of citizens living on the threshold of destitution; brilliant, innovative architecture contrasted with insalubrious neighborhoods; the most exclusive cars shared the streets with buses and the subway, always full to bursting. Mexico City was, moreover, a metropolis with such a high rate of violent crime that it had one of the world’s highest populations of private security guards.
Nothing stimulates creation like living in a state of contradiction, immoderation and difference. It seems unthinkable that an artist’s work could be completely alien to its surroundings, especially in a city that generates notable waves of anti-globalization activity and rebellion. The Mexican artist of the most recent generations is not, therefore, likely to be indifferent to such an exceptional environment, although the reactions may vary greatly from one artist to another. The ten artists represented in this exhibition are all natives of Mexico City with the exception of Thomas Glassford and Gerardo Suter, who, of course, live and work there.
Another factor to be taken into account was the invigorating exchange that took place when a series of foreign artists landed in Mexico during the same period when several Mexican artists who had pursued art studies in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris or Madrid returned to their country. The foreigners and Mexicans alike were bent on developing their artistic activities in Mexico. Among the former were the Belgian Francis Alÿs Smith, the Spaniard Santiago Sierra and the British artist Thomas Glassford and Melanie Smith. Among those who were returning just at that time to their native country’s art scene were Mónica Castillo, Silvia Gruner and Gabriel Orozco. The case of Víctor Pimstein is different: he had left his country at age 23 to study at Harvard, but did not return to Mexico in the 90s as did the others mentioned here. Rather, he came to terms with his separation from his roots and settled in Barcelona, where he resides today.
At that time all of these artists shared a number of circumstances: their marginalized condition, the general indifference that their work received, and their determination to turn their backs on the existing cultural infrastructure. That cultural establishment was characterized by extreme nationalism, a strong market orientation and blindness to the diverse subcultures and eclectic marginal practices that were precisely the ones that they, who were very young then, pursued through the use of alternative media, video, photography, installations or performances. The lack of non-commercial spaces where they could explore these practices and media or exhibit their work moved them to look for their own meeting and work spaces in warehouses, garages and unoccupied shops or offices. They used these premises not only to make art, but also to show it to the public and organize parties and concerts. They created a social dynamic, propagated an unconventional life style and undertook exchanges with other countries and cultures. There was no place in the rigid existing cultural infrastructure for any of these things. The new generation thus promoted their own spaces, suited to those innovative artistic practices, alternative spaces that were emerging for the first time in Mexico, and which would soon become new, very heavily frequented meeting places. Some of them have resisted the passage of time and transformations of all kinds, and still exist today.
In recent years that initially spontaneous, marginal venture has become a new heritage for the country, and is at the point of origin of the tremendously solid contribution of those artists to contemporary Western art. Many of them are represented by internationally renowned galleries. Their contribution is defined, in its diversity, by its cosmopolitan nature and by the fact that it proposes a reflection on the challenges, tensions and dilemmas that arise in the territories between individualism and globalization, memory and dissociation. The exhibition brings together some examples of this, while apprising the spectator that it does not seek to discover new values, but rather to summarize briefly a scene by including some of the artists whose work was exhibited in the 1997 traveling show entitled “Point of Departure”. This exhibition traveled to the states of Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, among others. It constituted the international recognition of the participating artists, including Mónica Castillo, Yishai Jusidman, Gerardo Suter and Boris Viskin.
It should be noted from the outset that this generation’s experimental practices did not banish painting. Rather, they encouraged painters considerably to change the direction of their medium. From the very beginning, that change placed a group of painters on a brilliant international plane. They are represented here by Yishai Jusidman, Víctor Pimstein and Boris Viskin.
Jusidman has been described by Osvaldo Sánchez as one of the few conceptual artists who works with painting media; Sánchez considers that “esthetic illusion is the real subject of his paintings”. Sánchez has pursued a coherent career in several successive stages centering on fundamental pictorial problems. Narciso, one of his most recent works, represents him here. Víctor Pimstein is the breakaway painter, the painter of transgression, of memories that do not spring from experience but are depicted —in this case, landscapes taken not from nature but from post cards. Boris Viskin, painter of uprootedness, resorts to a texturally rich painting technique in order to evoke memory and tradition. Half-way between reality and abstraction, he uses aggregate material to allude to the petate or sleeping mat that, placed directly on the floor, is used instead of a mattress in hot climates.
Other artists stress more contemporary and universal concerns and themes. One of these is ecology, the center of interest for Yolanda Gutiérrez, who works with elements from nature that she imbues with a sense of both protest and lyricism. Laura Anderson Barbata, another artist who is concerned about ecology, enriches the poetic and protesting nature of her proposals by evoking primitive, disappearing languages and ethnologies.
Photography is represented by photojournalism and the denunciation of the wrongs and abuses perceived by Maya Goded, who offers different photo series whose subject is women in Mexico. This exhibition presents, for the first time in public, the series she has dedicated to women in plaster casts. On the other end of the thematic spectrum is the eminently esthetic, symbolic work of Gerardo Suter, who generally explores the subjects of memory and Mexico.
Mónica Castillo is an artist who investigates the themes of memory and identity, and who has created a long series centered around her face and body, seeking he own identity in her memory.
Paula Santiago also pursues an investigation of her memory and identity through an extreme language that makes use of her hair and blood for her work on fabrics and old lace. This she accomplishes with a poetic approach that links tradition and modernity.
Thomas Glassford creates disturbing objects whose feeling ranges from coldness to eroticism, and whose focus is always on memory and and the evocation of lived experience.
The most recent generations have contributed such a large number of artists of interest that selecting only eleven of them has been an arduous task. They are, finally: Laura Anderson Barbata (1958), Mónica Castillo (1961), Thomas Glassford (1963), Yolanda Gutiérrez (1970), Maya Goded (1967), Yishai Jusidman (1963), Víctor Pimstein (1962), Paula Santiago (1969), Gerardo Suter (1957) and Boris Viskin (1960). We have, nonetheless, set ourselves the goal of representing, through them, a broad range of options, from painting to performance, which would enable us to offer an initial approach to contemporary Mexican art.
M. Ll. B.
Laura Anderson Barbata
(Mexico City, 1958)
Laura Anderson studied sculpture and engraving at the University of Rio de Janeiro’s School of Visual Arts, architecture at the Universidad Motolina in México and sociology at the University of California at San Diego. After working as a teacher in Mexico, she settled in New York, from where she travels frequently to study primitive cultures in such areas as the Caribbean, Venezuela, or Canada. She integrates into the societies she studies for a time to carry out different cooperative projects. Outstanding among these is the teaching of paper-making, and even the creation of hand-crafted books, using native plants. She has taught these skills on the Cotocachi-Cayapas reservation in Ecuador and in the Yanomani, Yukuana and Piaroa communities in the Venezuelan Amazon.
Her experiences with native peoples inspire her creation of works of art and installations such the cycle entitled Faust: the Spirit of the Earth (1996 to 2001). She has exhibited paintings, drawings and objects in solo and group shows since 1986. She uses textile materials such as thread and fabric to develop themes based on the body and the senses as metaphors for the human condition, resorting to the mask or the faceless silhouette to mirror personal and social circumstances. Her use of organic materials is an affirmation of the encounters that take place between culture and nature.
In 1997 she staged her performance I have no one to help me at home at the MARCO (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Monterrey, Mexico. In the following year her Anonymous Portraits were included in the exhibition Five Continents and a City. The faces depicted in the portraits were replaced by large orchid leaves outlined by white backstitches to suggest religious icons, native rituals, and the popular worldview. In 1999 the Board of Directors of New York’s Wave Hill Park invited her to set up an installation in the park’s eight-acre woodland. This vast, complex work consisted of laying out pathways carpeted by flower petals that she had previously dried in her workshop.
Laura Anderson Barbata is the creator of a body of work of multiple registers that explores her own identity through other cultures, without ever resorting to stereotypes or clichés, but rather manifesting a deep, renewed interest in nature, ethnography and ecology.
Merry Mac Masters
Laura Anderson brings her paper-making project from the Amazon to Chiapas
After a decade of working in the Amazon, particularly in the area inhabited by the Yanomami, and for the past two years in Trinidad and Tobago, Mexican visual artist Laura Anderson Barbata will start up this craft industry in the Lacandona jungle. The objective is for indigenous groups to manufacture books for their own intellectual enrichment and for their schools.
A videotape included in Terra incógnita makes it clear that the Yanomami, Ye’kuana and Piaroa have taken over this activity and made it their own, a very satisfying outcome for Anderson.
How to make canoes
The artist traveled to Venezuela upon winning the Eco Art competition, whose prize was the publication of her work in that South American country. Some friends advised her to go to the Amazon —she had already visited the Brazilian Amazon— “where people make utilitarian objects that resemble your sculptures”. In the course of her first trip, Anderson encountered a Ye’kuana master who taught the Yanomami how to make canoes. The canoe-building process fascinated her, and she wanted to learn. When this idea was put to the community, they agreed to accept her as an apprentice, but they asked, “What will you teach us in return?” And Laura offered them the paper-making project.
This is how the book entitled Shapono, which means “communal house”, came into being in an edition of 50 copies. Response to the book was excellent: it won the prize for the best book of the year awarded by the Centro Nacional del Libro de Venezuela (Venezuela’s National Book Center), and copies were purchased by New York Public Library and the libraries of Princeton University and Parson’s New School of Design. The book is made with the same plant fibers used by the community to make their utilitarian objects and products, such as the vegetable dies they use to decorate their bodies. When the time came to print the book, it was “easy” to transfer those body decorations onto the page.
Headless self-portrait
Anderson gives talks illustrated by her drawings, so that “technology will not ride roughshod over a culture; on the contrary, we walk hand in hand, we’re going to say things”.
She has also created objects that are indirectly tied to her work in the Amazon, such as the installation-sculpture entitled Autorretrato (Self-portrait) in which a headless woman crosses a bridge suspended above the courtyard of the exhibition space. The artist, Anderson says, is constantly doing self-portraits, so much that he or she becomes “the mirror of who I am within the confines of the visual language I use”. She is now using the headless self-portrait to plumb and to know that self, so that she is “not guided by what I think or see, because at times the mind and eyes can deceive us, but rather by something I feel inside”.
In Consuelo, the image of the Virgin is also headless in order to “free her of that burden she carries on her face”.
The visual artist strives to prevent “technology from riding roughshod over culture”.
Mónica Castillo
(Mexico City, 1961)
Mónica Castillo was trained in Mexico and Europe. She obtained various scholarships enabling her to study drawing and engraving at the Scuola Germanica in Rome and painting at the German art schools Freie Kunstschule Stuttgart and the Akademie der BiIdenden Kunste, also in Stuttgart. She has been exhibiting her work, which has been seen the world over, since 1984, and has taught art in Mexico and the United States. While she began her career with an orientation toward conceptual art, the subjects of her work later came to revolve around the concept of femininity, broken femininity, and the face as an emblem of identity. At times she contrasts the self-portrait with the photograph. Her main concerns are the problems of representation, and she offers a referential examination of her own face, in which she seeks her identity and her memory. While she voluntarily limits her subject matter, she presents it in a rich language, achieving an imaginative, varied body of work that includes painting, the painted object, photography and videotape. Her myriad but always different self-portraits clearly evidence her versatility in the search for her own identity, in the exhaustive investigation of her memory.
We are showing one of her self-portraits in oil painted in 1997, Autorretrato como cualquiera (Self-portrait as anyone), and a more recent (2001) videotape entitled Autorretrato de Bailarina (Self-portrait as a dancer). These two works mark a working process that has sustained an amazing consistency and variety from beginning to end.
Mónica Castillo
[One of my strongest interests…]
One of my strongest interests in the last ten years has been to break down and assign positions to the elements involved in referential pictorial representation.
Some of the questions I have considered have centered around how to enlarge the relationship between what is represented and the object (in the Autorretrato como cualquiera [Self-portrait as anyone], I did this by using a photographic “error”: leaving the image out of focus) and how to subvert the relationships, which I could almost call mechanical, between the artist, the model and the pictorial subject.
Instead of letting the model and the plane in which the subject is represented be passive elements, and the painter be the active element and color an intermediary agent, in the case of the Autorretrato de Bailarina (Self-portrait as a dancer), the dancer is the model, the pictorial plane, the carrier of the subject and the painter all at once. Through strictly balletic movements, she pours the color over her body, achieving a sort of unintentional self-portrait.
Thomas Glassford
(Laredo, 1963)
Educated at the University of Texas, Glassford arrived in Mexico in 1990 and immediately integrated himself into the emerging Mexican art scene. His first landscapes done in dull colors, made of contemptible material, of paper, patent leather, plastic, etc., not framed but rather stretched using a system involving metal industrial turnbuckles, included unusual elements such as zippers, buckles and brooches, as if they were meant to paraphrase arte povera. They set the stage for his subsequent development in which he would work with all sorts of objects and materials intended for industrial production, in a veiled critique of minimalism.
In Autogoles (Own Goals) he set up wall mirrors that would incorporate the spectators into the work while, in a videotape in which the artist looked at his reflection in a mirror and kissed it, denounced the artist’s narcissism. His three-dimensional pieces are somewhere between a cold, disquieting symbology and a voluptuous eroticism. He has also presented both antiseptic orthogonal metal pieces and others that reveal a preoccupation for emphasizing curved lines, rounded surfaces and spherical volumes.
The works that represent him in our exhibition have all come out of his studio recently, and are exponents of a tendency to satirize the supposed perfection of minimalism. Through the use of “cold” metals such as aluminum, gold-colored metal, mirrors and fluorescent light, they succeed in producing a warm, emotional feeling. This can be seen both in pieces such as Partitura (2002) and in others produced in 2003: Tower, 9 Slat Tall and Aster 140.
Thomas Glassford
Mexico City. Thomas Glassford. Torre de los Vientos. Galería OMR
The elimination of considerations of taste was a common goal during the golden age of minimalist and conceptual art. The purpose was to succeed in dissociating art from both the frivolity of Pop and bourgeois hypocrisy. But it is ironic that, in the last decade, the minimalist / conceptual look has enjoyed a steadily increasing popularity and has engendered a flourishing market. And that look has become the standard of good taste, intelligent, elegant and wholesome.
This series of events is evidenced in the work of artist Thomas Glassford, born in Laredo (Texas). Glassford has been exploring the functional potential of sculpture since he moved to Mexico City at the beginning of the 1990s. For years he used dried gourds to create sexually provocative Baroque assemblages which he joined to hassocks, mirrors, chandeliers and jewelry. Now the symbolic resonances that drove his earlier work have been superseded by an interest in optical effectiveness. The way in which he handles fluorescent tubes, metal frames and Plexiglas may remind us of Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, or Laddie John Dill. However, when Glassford refashions a specific object, he deliberately converts it into a decorative element, and does not mind if it is considered a piece of merchandise.
The first of Glassford’s new star-shaped chandeliers was created for the interior of a ziggurat built for the 1968 Olympics by Gonzalo Fonseca (recently remodeled to house contemporary projects). The thirty fluorescent lights of Aster 500 (Explosión 500; all works created in 2001) are concentrically joined at a spherical base. The colossal stellar contrivance transforms the tubes, which on other occasions are clearly humble objects, into delicate axial lamps, filling the exhibition space with a cone of otherworldly light that is simultaneously cold and flattening, creating a sensation of excessive luxury that masks its daily use in offices and stores. A smaller fluorescent light, Aster 250, decorated the fin-de-siècle entrance hall of the Galería OMR. To say that it was lovely is not a superficial compliment; such a remark serves to confirm the fact that, from the standpoint of Glassford’s post-minimalist esthetic, it was fulfilling its function.
Another strategy for extracting beauty from objects showing bad taste can be seen in Glassford’s “Partituras” (Sheet Music) —monochromatic rectangular assemblages that, for practical purposes, function as paintings. The surfaces are composed of a series of vertical motifs made of lengths of aluminum framing material. These large geometric topographies (peaks, valleys, canyons, steppes) accent the interaction of the metal with the ambient lighting, be it natural or artificial. Light and shadow are transformed into rhythmic gradations of color, saturation, and tone, in such a way that these visual qualities seem to be completely separate from their metal support. This fact is not a simple exercise in the psychology of perception. Suddenly, the contemptible ersatz bronze and silver finishes of the anodized aluminum become, in the support, an optical phenomenon, as occurred in the similar commissioned pieces the artist made in aristocratic Burgundy with a kitschy pink finish. Nonetheless, Glassford’s understanding of the minimalist approach, seasoned with Op and garnished with a little bit of Pop, never depends on pyrotechnics on the technical level, nor on faked indifference. On the contrary, it exudes total elegance from beginning to end.
Perhaps the final test for art that flirts with decoration (from Klimt to Matisse and Pardo) is to make sure of its virtues, in the same way all “good art” guarantees its virtues finally, even though it does so with good taste. Glassford’s work entails a different risk: when our weakness for the minimalist / conceptual look has run its course, it may be that its artistic merits will pass unnoticed. But even if this happens, it will still be beautiful.
Maya Goded
(Mexico City, 1967)
Goded studied photography in Coyoacán and at the International Photography Center in New York. She worked as assistant to Graciela Iturbide, whom she considers her master teacher.
Her work was shown repeatedly in exhibitions in Mexico, and she published several books of photographs, among which Terra negra (Mexico 1994) bears highlighting. Subsequently she participated in the group exhibition of contemporary Mexican photography entitled “Territorios Singulares” (Singular Territories), which was presented in Madrid in 1997 in the Canal de Isabel II exhibition space. From there she went on to a solo exhibition at the Reina Sofía Museum of her series on prostitutes entitled “Barrio de la soledad” (Loneliness District).
In her work she continues in the Mexican current of social commitment, which in the 1970s was linked to the revolutionary changes taking place in South America, Cuba, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. While working in this vein, she has always striven to succeed not only in telling the photojournalistic story, but also in achieving artistic expression.
In this exhibition she is presenting to the public for the first time a sample of her work on the “women in plaster casts.” In these photographs she denounces the harsh reality of women who imprison their bodies in a thick layer of plaster to avoid gaining weight.
Elena Poniatowska
Maya Goded’s women
Maya Goded’s women are exposed to all the vicissitudes of life, no one protects them, not even Maya who bears witness to their suffering again and again. Although they slit these women’s throats, although their heads protrude from the guillotine, they survive so that Maya Goded can make them eternal. The steam bath resembles a potential guillotine because the lowered blood pressure it provokes can cause fainting. Of course, we must submit, our waists expand under the load; children and passing years weigh on our muscles. No euphemisms to describe a bulging waistline, such as “jovial perimeter,” are allowed. They are always measuring us with the measuring tape of that tough trade known as the beauty game.
In Mexico, being a woman entails a bit more work than it does in the United States or in Europe. The rape index is very high; the number of pregnancy terminations, including both miscarriages and abortions, is 1,700,000 a year, and the illiteracy rate is also horrifying. The percentage of women who succeed in entering higher education is seven percent. The difference in opportunities for men and women is also immense. Claude Broyelle said that women were the better half—“the heavenly half”—but he forgot that the great majority of us live in hell. How much longer will we be condemned to be blind hens who have lost a needle and a thimble? How many more years of being worn down by going from the bed to the sink, from the kitchen to the larder, from the market to the church, from doing today and undoing tomorrow, from the rooftop to the sewer?
I look at Maya Goded’s photographs. I shuffle and reshuffle them. I go through them backwards and forwards, again and again. And, apart from Maya herself, who re-emerges from the depths of the water, her daughter before her, I wonder what it is that separates us.
Years ago, Alaide Foppa told me an anecdote about the progress of the Soviet woman, her access to work previously done only by men, the privilege of driving tractors, streetcars, trailer trucks, removing snow in winter with power shovels, driving buses, an endless catalog of tasks once reserved for men. In the group of women employees, workers and farmers who were celebrating their promotion into modernity, a small woman wearing gloves and a hat dared to raise a voice made thin by timidity: “Ah, no! Me, I’d rather be a whore.”
Is the female population still swinging between those two alternatives? Maya Goded photographs four hands plucking a hen that is about to be quartered. Is that the fate in store for us?
Yolanda Gutiérrez
(Mexico City, 1970)
Because the relationship between man and nature is one of her prime concerns, Yolanda Gutiérrez works with natural materials found in the wild. A student of Nahuatl philosophy, she goes as far as to link nature with divinity. Among her most famous projects is the sculpture Umbral (Threshold), completed in 1992. This work consists of 28 sets of cow jaws arranged to suggest a great flock of birds in flight. Another celebrated piece is the sculpture-refuge she created in 1995 for the island of Cozumel off the coast of Yucatan, which served as a haven for nesting birds after the destruction wrought by the then recent hurricane Roxana.
She recycles animal bones, plants and objects that she frequently combines with earth, straw, stones, snail shells and similar materials. These she sometimes articulates in space with invisible ligaments so that they seem not to be her handiwork, but elements found in their natural surroundings.
The exhibition brings together a selection from her most recent sculptures constructed with organic elements found in nature, which in a certain way interpret and represent nature through an eminently poetic approach.
Luis Martín Lozano
Atl – Agua by Yolanda Gutiérrez
“…There are proposals like the ones Yolanda Gutiérrez offers, whose didactics of reception and simulating visual presence seem to have been able to breach this gap between the public and contemporary esthetics. Her work often reveals itself to us in all of its potential, in a clear, precise and even beautiful way of understanding the world around us. For various reasons we find her work not only highly modern, but also suggestive of a reflection on the near future, and at the same time acutely aware of the origin and history of the cultural values that we have inherited from the past”.
“…There are two moments of creation and reception that must be distinguished in her work: one, which corresponds to its contents —that is, to the conceptualization of an idea— and another that refers to the subsequent manifestation of those concepts, achieved through the creation of a visual language that we commonly call ‘form’ in the language of art history. This concept of the twinned moments of form and content, part of a centuries-old tradition, is evoked again with an incredible consecutive logic: I think, therefore I am”.
“…In the work of Yolanda Gutiérrez, the way in which the esthetic phenomenon is conceived has continuity with an ethical attitude that prompts her to try to understand nature and its compositional logic; she studies and analyzes the materials from the standpoint of their creation, she scrutinizes the consistency of leaves, the nobility of a piece of timber, the character of a rock, the transparency of water. She is never satisfied, she learns with each step she takes, and in her restless mind ideas are distilled into specific ethical concepts. Sometimes I think that she operates like a shaman wandering through the cosmos, capturing the secret of the essences of things and of what is primitive, ancestral and permanent, of what transcends time and delivers us into the present”.
“…Dualities, struggles, confrontations, pacts and convergences are implicit in Yolanda Gutiérrez’s entire visual world; it is, finally, a world impregnated with a primeval wisdom that values the complementarity of opposites”.
“…As the viewer can observe, Yolanda Gutiérrez’s work is not lacking in poetic associations. She enormously enjoys the lyrical capacity transmitted by nature, finding in it the beauty that is inherent in everything that was ever organic. She understands beauty to mean that, above all, the visual image must be simple, profoundly simple, its codes refined down to nearly nothing. But beauty must, at the same time, contain all the information that she aimed to reflect. While the beauty of which Yolanda Gutiérrez speaks can be delicate and fragile, it is also in constant tension, at the counterpoint of a fleetingly resolved reality”.
Yishai Jusidman
(Mexico City, 1963)
Osvaldo Sánchez’s approach to painting from the conceptual standpoint enabled him to write that Jusidman was one of the few Mexican conceptual artists who devoted himself to painting. His innovative exploration of the conventional pictorial tradition is summed up in a coherent whole, consisting of different series or cycles succeeding each other in time. Thus he works magic when he paints clowns, geishas, sumo wrestlers or mentally ill people.
The retrospective exhibition Investigaciones pictóricas (Pictorial Researches), organized in 1996, won him a first place among Mexican painters for the innovation of his pictorial proposals, which deepened the deconstruction of painting. In Jusidman’s work, the interest in articulating spatial relationships and the references to art history go back in time to the series entitled Astrónomo (Astronomer, 1987-90), in which the artist painted landscapes on spheres, landscapes rescued from the history of representational painting from the 17th century Dutch painters to Monet. Doing landscape painting on a spherical surface naturally implied a strongly marked relationship between pictorial space and physical space.
At the SMAK in Ghent he recently showed a selection of his latest works: Mutatis mutandis, Pintores trabajando (Painters at Work) and Narciso plotters (Narcissus Plotters). In Mutatis mutandis, a set of digital photographs directly depicts a series of characters who also appeared in the Bajo tratamiento (Under Treatment) series. To create these images Jusidman digitally combined the original photograph he used as a basis for the canvas with the image of the finished painting. This technique produces a very special optical effect; it is definitely an exercise in contrasts in which contents already existing in his work are processed into new forms, which articulate, in turn, new contents. The intention in the digital superimpositions is to contrast certain characteristics of the photograph with the brush strokes, outlining and warmth captured in the painted image.
In the same series, the Narcissisus Plotter paintings deal with the challenge of giving plastic treatment to printing with a large-format plotter. Making use of an electrostatic printer that uses the offset pattern emphasizes the contrast between the rosette effect and the effect of planes of pure color, and the contrast between image and geometric pattern. Jusidman thus imbues this medium with an uncommon plastic spatial quality. While the story of Narcissus alludes to the useless falling in love with the virtual, these prints reminiscent of Op art set in motion a range of reflections and meditations on how all pictorial effects depend on the materials used in their production.
Eva Wittocx
Painting under construction
For Jusidman, the stylistic and rhetorical arguments that articulate his subjects originate in the desire to envelop the viewer in a complete, organic experience of the work. The work functions as a mirror that literally and metaphorically distorts by giving the created image a spherical look, veiling it, amplifying and recontextualizing it. Such manipulations are shrewdly handled in order to allow the friendly coexistence of figurative, abstract and concrete representations; and also to suggestively interweave form, content and the vehicle. The Sumo series (1995-98) illustrates this artist’s pictorial strategies: the action of the fight becomes blurred with miniature realism, while the background is designed in abstract fashion by dividing the image in geometric surfaces which are, in turn, determined by the positioning of the wrestlers in the plane of the picture. It should be noted that this interweaving of styles is far from the cacophonic, anti-modern methods of “pictorial blending” used by Salle and Polke.
Jusidman’s rather classic idea of “painting-as-mirror” regenerates tensions inherent in the art of painting, tensions that are the result of the interdependence of form and content in the articulation of esthetic meaning.
Jusidman usually works with secondary derivations of existing representations; this is why the work, as mirror, reflects toward its interior. However, the work re-emerges through a distorting technique that is able to seduce the viewer. Jusidman tends to use reproductions of works of art, both by repainting them (which he did in his appropriation of naturalistic landscape painting in the Astrónomo [Astronomer] series) and by filtering them through other media (as in the Mutatis mutandis series). In the plotter prints of the Narciso (Narcissus) series, we see printed reproductions of known works of De Kooning, Morandi and Velázquez, each of them together with its mirror image. As painted by Jusidman, the shimmering surface of Narcissus’ pool is equivalent to the surface of the printed work. The ripples that blur the illusion in the water become analogous and the optical vibration effects of the computer articulation generate the printed images. Again, in contrast to Narcissus, we find ourselves more attracted by the vehicle of the illusion than by the object of the illusion itself.
For Jusidman, the literal inclusion of the paintings of other artists in his work has been a method of precisely aligning his production within the Western painting tradition.
Víctor Pimstein Ratinoff
(Mexico City, 1962)
This painter’s work starts from his reflection on what he observes in his environment and which, duly worked out in the form of a dialog, gives rise to a complete, highly personal pictorial series dedicated to a subject, like, for example, the series of paintings Vermeer dedicated to Delft.
After studying architecture at Harvard, comparative literature at Columbia University in New York, and film and television at Syracuse University, in 1989 he settled in Barcelona, where he still lives and exhibits regularly. This is how he has defined his nomadic sentiment: “When one has moved from place to place, from language to language and from culture to culture for so many generations, the old, natural continuity between personal and social identity is immediately fractured. The physical and symbolic territories stop seeming to be natural extensions of one’s own self; this fracture unveils the artificiality and intentionality that operate behind the construction of landscape”.
It is in this statement by the painter that we must seek the meaning of the fractured painting he presents in this exhibition. Pimstein understands landscape not as something contemplated, but as a relationship between painter and place, in which the painter’s self is enriched and modified in a context that goes beyond the limits of direct experience. And he states, “When I tried to imagine a primeval landscape, I saw the saturated blues and turquoises of postcards; when I thought of an epic landscape, the images of western movies came up —a desert surrounded by the ruins of a peculiar geography or topography. Thinking of the generosity and benevolence of the earth brought me fragments of ceramics, of pastoral and decorative textiles. These images are my flag and my country. Despite all the places I’ve seen and heard about, I’ve never known a sky as blue, a sea as transparent, a more intact and perfect place than the ones I find shining, like a piece of Byzantine enamel work, on any postcard from any vacation spot”.
Víctor Pimstein
Ratinoff Essence
In contrast to the pale images we call “memory”, there are exceptional moments when a perfume, an essence, takes us by surprise, tearing us violently away from the place and time we occupy to transport us to a hidden place, to a forgotten time. The experience shakes us with the intensity of a storm and agitates, in the air before and inside us, the ghosts of a lost room, of a voice, of the light that illuminates other faces, of a different feeling.
Thus, for a moment, we have the privilege of living simultaneously in different times, of being in several places at once. We defy the tyranny of the present that chains us up day after day and we relegate it to its place of just importance in the continuous transit that is life: the tyranny of changing our desires into memories and our wishes into nostalgia and imagination.
At those moments, life opens out into dimensions and progressions that are both simultaneous and contradictory. We are simultaneously a “was” and a “will be”. The present becomes the body of time, the tense, vibrant surface where the reflections of the changing light of the skies and the dense light that pushes up from the depths converge. At that instant, the world takes on a corporeality that is so rich and exultant, so detailed and precise that, when the moment passes, it leaves us shipwrecked, surprised at finding ourselves still alive on the same shore where we stood at the outset.
The essence —intense, fleeting, volatile— that unleashed the storm, is nothing more than the key to gain access to our memory, to the most intimate territory of our imagination. Memory makes use of that essence to make its presence felt, just as a spirit may make use of any body to manifest itself, leaving us, when it disappears, the full, bitter taste of our own mortality.
That is what I want my paintings to be: paths giving access to the materiality of time. I would like them to be able to fade away the moment they are seen, like the perfume that seems to evaporate, while in fact it branches out in the dark, working the depths of our memory.
Like a perfumer, the abstractor of medieval alchemy, I seek to distill essences, to find the purest, most permanent substance in things, the principle that defines them and that gets away from me time after time. To distill is to do violence to the integrity of the material world, to the apparent integrity of memory; to distill is to fragment that world by force, it is a form of cruelty that renounces the whole in the attempt to seize that dense, volatile particle where the secret of its being, its ultimate truth, dwells.
I hope that my paintings are as disturbing as the experience of déjà-vu, and that they will assault, with a contained violence, those who look at them, obliging them to seek inside themselves the exact place they claim. I want my paintings to belong to the people who, when they see them, make them so deeply theirs that they feel that the painter has been nothing more than the instrument that they, as viewers, have used to gain access to their own vision.
Paula Santiago
(Guadalajara, 1969)
After studying industrial engineering, Paula Santiago took a degree in plastic arts from the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico. She took private drawing and painting classes in Paris, where she also studied French language and literature. It was there that she decided to become an artist. After a stay in London, she returned to Mexico, where she studied pre-Columbian art. When she finally made the decision to pursue a career in art, she stated that she did not wish to lay down images on canvas, but to work with her own life.
When the ArtPace Foundation invited her to participate in its international artist-in-residence program, she abandoned her paintbrushes once and for all and began to work with her hands, appropriating the embroidery and lace work kept by her family. These hand-crafted objects were, all in all, associated with the body. She gradually went on to turn her own body into the raw material of art, extracting her blood to use as color and converting her hair into thread to sew together fragments of cloth or paper. Then she stopped using fabric and began exploring the possibilities offered by rice paper and other apparently fragile materials whose strength is, nonetheless, sufficient for her purposes. The next step was to create three-dimensional works. In her first exposition, organized in 1999 at the Iturralde Gallery in Los Angeles, she showed a series of small suits that seemed taken from a remote past, each housed in its own glass urn.
We wanted to exhibit two of Santiago’s works, Guerrero (Warrior, 1998) and the triptych Las tres gracias (The Three Graces), that were produced during that early stage in her career. Because doctors advised her not to continue painting with her own blood, her works from that early period are highly sought after and difficult to obtain.
Laurel Reuter
Entering the light
Artist Paula Santiago fuses together the worlds of darkness and light, of forgotten time and today, of the ancient art of pre-Columbian cultures and today’s modern Mexico, which is her world.
She began in the most ordinary way. Born in 1969 in Santiago, she grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico, and, when the time came for higher education, enrolled in the college of industrial engineering at the Universidad Panamericana near her house. She was a good student, but engineering did not satisfy her. When she was 21, she left for Paris. She was going to be an artist.
She took private drawing and painting lessons; she studied French language and literature at the Sorbonne; she was a regular visitor to Parisian museums. She moved to London, where she worked in an artist’s studio, and frequented local museums. She returned to Mexico, where she enrolled in more art classes and immersed herself in the primitive art of Middle America: the pre-Columbian art of the Olmecs, the first Mayans, the Toltec, Mixtec, and Aztec cultures. She gave the impression of a person seeking her legitimate place.
At age 23 Paula Santiago stopped painting; she did not want to create images on canvas that would serve to represent something. She needed to work for herself, to begin to create from inside herself. “I didn’t want to work with concepts; I wanted to work with my life”.
She was only 27 when she won a place as resident artist at the ArtPace Foundation for Contemporary Art in San Antonio, Texas. And she was struggling tenaciously to find her own voice.
Having abandoned painting, Santiago again created art, this time with her own hands doing embroidery work, an activity rescued from her childhood. For her show at ArtPace she appropriated the family heirlooms made by her aunt Lupita, who, 80 years earlier, had spent hours embroidering an assortment of beautiful handkerchiefs in white on white. Santiago turned them into her canvases, and, with tiny stitches, gave new meanings to their old surfaces. Occasionally she would add small seeds decorated with appliqués that would, in time, stain the adjoining cloth with subtle variations in color.
Paula Santiago’s inner journey began in San Antonio and would continue for the next five years. Even the materials she used became deeply personal. She began to extract her own blood and to stain surfaces with it. Venous blood, deprived of the oxygen it finds in its journey through the human body, shows a red color that, in time, changes into tones of brown and beige, like earth tones. Setting aside the silk thread traditionally used in embroidery, she incorporated the use of human hair as thread, taking her own hair, her grandmother’s hair and friends’ hair for the purpose. The hair became her unifying thread, her way of joining disparate parts. She found it enigmatic: it protected the body while moving away from it as it grew. Moreover, since hair contains the memory of the body’s past, it could allude to the passage of time.
She abandoned fabric as the structural base of her art and began working with wax and rice paper, deceptive materials since they appear fragile but are really strong and resistant. Because these two materials can be transparent or opaque, either one can represent ideas of major importance involving knowing and not knowing, of seeking what is concealed and concealing the visible. At first Santiago worked in two dimensions. However, the artist remarked, “I needed to add more volume. I needed more than one layer”. In the same way as her materials served as a metaphor for time covered by another layer of time, she needed to construct sculptural images, layer by layer.
In 1999, when Santiago opened her solo show at the Iturralde Gallery in Los Angeles, she had already reached full artistic maturity. She had learned to create sets of works in which each finished piece was a fragment of a whole. She found that giving a name to the whole was as difficult as finding names for the individual pieces. To her first exhibition at Iturralde she gave the title Moan, a Maya word for the bird that flies the highest in the world. Because this bird lives above the clouds, very close to heaven, few have seen it. Those who have seen the moan say that it resembles a quetzal, so beautiful that it is like light itself. The title the artist has given to the current exhibition is Septum, a Latin word for the impermeable membrane that divides and enters into contact with the two upper chambers of the heart, and which only develops fully when we are born and our blood begins to circulate through the normal channels of the heart.
Moan was a dark, disquieting exhibition that many visitors found disturbing, even offensive. Santiago had filled the gallery with glass display cases, each containing a small garment that some unknown being could have worn in a remote dream. Some included packages; all were made of hair and blood, Japanese rice paper and mesh paper. The feeling of absence was palpable. It was as if all those who had been important in some way had left a long time ago, leaving an empty land behind them. Only their spiritual essence would remain. The artist says, “I want my work to appear to be pending, unfinished. I want my work to be in motion, to transmit the idea of the fleeting nature of knowledge”. The exhibition traveled to the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, where some visitors balked at the entrance; they were uncomfortable, reluctant to go in, aware of the darkness the room held. Just as true poetry can be conveyed before it is understood, the disturbing spiritual presence in Santiago’s art can be felt long before it can be explained. As in ancient Aztec art, viewers intuit an underlying violence that does not attract them. To create Moan, the artist made a journey to the edge of a solitary, private personal abyss. Her art shows visible marks from that journey. Still, as poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “In times of darkness, the eye begins to see”.
Shortly after Moan, Paula Santiago was diagnosed as having a melanoma in her oft-sunburned right arm. Almost miraculously, her life changed course, turning toward the light, toward health.
She would never again extract her own blood. On the contrary, she brought together all the drawings made with blood on rice paper that she had left and covered them with thin coats of translucent beeswax. She cut them into very thin strips and wove delicate membranes with them. She constructed other fragments of wax, forms that emerged from her particular journey of lost steps to the depths of her inner life, empty forms that resembled shields, hides, armor and sheaths for absent beings. Gradually the parts joined in the form of small wax sculptures, each one placed, with a mouthful of air, inside a gleaming glass case. Glass is not just a subtly reflecting material; it also lends a colder look to the yellow wax while bringing out the red of the blood that is buried under the wax, whose color is paler.
These floating forms refer us to fleeting memories of Eskimo bone sculptures, of the ritual masks of the Bering Sea area, a Greek figurine, an Egyptian bird or an Aztec serpent. Encapsulated in glass, these mysterious objects are the living relatives of the eternal art of earlier cultures. It is as if both the artist and her art had fed on Xipe-Totec, the Middle American god of spring. Filled with the spirit of rebirth and renovation, a very powerful witch doctor
—“especially potent in the eyes”— dresses himself in the skin of another who is the product of a ritual sacrifice.
Even when she was emotionally vulnerable and physically fragile, and before her current work came into being, Santiago traveled to India. There she learned that she could “light a lamp inside herself”, that she could build an inner home for herself. Then, while she was visiting Tenochtitlan in the very heart of today’s Mexico City, she bumped into two guards of the Great Temple. Set in the stone of the temple or perhaps emerging from it, their chests were covered with fragments of rock. Those little seeds of ideas.
Gerardo Suter
(Buenos Aires, 1957)
Suter began his creative career in the field of photography, gradually enriching his proposals, which he currently presents as video installations, with other media such as sound or the Internet.
Since the 1980s he has been one of the most recognized photographers in Mexico because of the virtuoso technique that he places at the service of his images and symbols. His subjects are drawn from the Mexican tradition, the earth and mankind. He prefers to work in black and white, and usually presents his eminently symbolic works in the form of video installations that create simultaneously real and virtual spaces. Memory has been a recurrent theme whose exploration culminated in his 1996 installation Geografía de la memoria (Geography of Memory), where he examines a set of problems based on the human body, time and territory.
Since his creation of monumental acetates for specific spaces and the Códices americanos (American Codices) series, he has created thousands of installations. Among his most recent productions is Zócalo (the title refers to Mexico City’s main square), an interactive installation with two simultaneous video projections and a live broadcast, via Internet, which he presented at the Hanover Universal Fair in the year 2000.
In La caja negra (The Black Box), one of his first works, he placed the human body on the border between life and death, between belonging and being, between disappearing and transforming itself. In contrast to that early installation, the work with which we represent him in the exhibition, Skin, el cuerpo fragmentado (Skin: the Fragmented Body), places the human body in confrontation with each individual’s body, thus setting up a dialog between photography and the perception of reality. This is an installation that displays, both on the walls and floor, images of different parts of the male body —the face and cranium, feet and hands— creating tension between the body shown and the viewer’s perception of his own body. To achieve all this, he uses a series of color photos on Velcro and two video projections on the floor and on one of the walls.
In 1988 the Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundations jointly awarded him a film, video and multimedia fellowship. Since 1997 he is a member of Mexico’s National Creators System (Sistema Nacional de Creadores), in the Visual Arts area.
Karen Cordero Reiman
“This is not a photograph”
In 1929 the Belgian surrealist René Magritte painted The Betrayal of Images, in which, using the image of a pipe and a legend announcing “This is not a pipe”, he questioned the conventions governing the relationship between pictorial and verbal representation and “reality”. Similarly, although without articulating his intentions so literally, the Argentine-born Mexican visual artist Gerardo Suter —in his work over the past two decades— has been questioning the direct correspondence which is often assumed between photography and observed reality, using this medium as a point of departure for exploring the way in which objective and subjective “realities” enter into dialog and interaction in human perceptual processes.
Since the end of the 1970s he has become known as one of the main proponents of a Mexican “constructed photography” in which this medium is not a vehicle for social documentation, but rather a source of possibilities for formal and conceptual creation. Throughout the 1980s he made forays into the creation of metaphorical works and fictional narratives in which the tension between the realism of the medium and the creation of symbolic images in larger and larger formats became increasingly prominent. In the 90s, the digital printing of very large photographs on translucent support media, and their combination with multimedia resources in the creation of installations —where the discourse on the body predominates— accompanied the transfer of Suter’s reflections to the realm of space: physical (bodily), social and psychological. Moreover, the increased use of computer resources, both in his installations and in his environment, has led to the development in Suter’s work of a reflection on the perceptual implications of this technology.
It is in this context that we can place Skin, el cuerpo fragmentado (Skin: the Fragmented Body), in which Suter further extends his questioning of the photographic medium by creating representations that look like, but are not, photographs. These allude to the media technology that creates visual representations of our bodily processes, rendering the invisible legible by interleaving and recomposing fragments of information that are translated into binary code. While the results resemble analog images, they are really a mere symbolic reference in the information system that envelops us.
Skin, el cuerpo fragmentado invites us to question our relationship with and awareness of this system through a multisensorial perception of a set of works that seeks to make these processes evident.
Boris Viskin
(Mexico City, 1960)
One of contemporary Mexico’s most recognized painters, Viskin received the Rufino Tamayo Biennial Painting Prize in 1998 and 1992, as well as the Monterrey Biennial Prize in 1992. In his climatic painting, which totally avoids any allusion to the cliché “Mexican” colorful atmosphere, Viskin tries arbitrarily to reconstruct the real, as he puts it, adding, “Everything is reduced to that emptiness as a sense of uprootedness, and the ephemeral is its emotional argument”. He was referring to the emptiness expressed by his work of the 1990s, exemplified in one of his seminal works, Homage to Piero de la Francesca, painted in 1997.
The examples of the Ptlatl series that we are presenting in this exhibition are, in the Aztec language, the common “petates”, or mats, generally made of palm leaves, which serve as mattresses in hot climates. He depicts them by applying texturally rich paints, whose thickness is achieved by patiently building up layer after layer of color in different tonalities, ranging from the warmest to the most perfectly cold tones. The broad gamut of colors gives rise to a confrontation (war and coexistence, rejection and attraction) between the abstract and the figurative, without letting the paintings cease to be mere objects in which tradition and modernity find a meeting point.
Blanca González Rosas
Boris Viskin’s Humanist Abstraction
In the three series of paintings done over the past two years, Viskin has shown a maturity and an artistic daring that deserve to be cited. To the deconstruction and construction the artist does in these series of the formal obsessions that have characterized him, it would have been advisable and interesting to add some examples of his previous work. However, despite their not being present in reproduction form, their presence is constant through the formal transmutations that are evinced in the Ptlatl, Ptlatl de mar y lluvia (Sea and Ran Ptlatl), and Ptlatl y templos (Ptlatl and Temples) series. These three series, in which geometric abstract language predominates, start from the deconstruction of the forms of the Mexican Ptlatl or mat made of woven palm leaves. Nonetheless, depending on what is deconstructed, they are integrated into images that differ as regards the predominance of figures or lines: in the Ptlatl series, the squares of different materials and textures maintain the evocation of the structures of those objects; in Ptlatl de mar y lluvia they are reduced to vertical lines evoking the falling of the rainwater, and to horizontal lines that refer to the visuality of the sea. In Ptlatl y templos, however, what is deconstructed is integrated into figures and rectangles that generate that feeling of grandeur and smallness characteristic of sacred places, which is also characteristic of the painter’s neo-Expressionist and semi-figurative periods. These works are exponents of the new pictorial concepts in which the genre overflows traditional materials and forms, generating diverse two-dimensional expressions that start from conceptual play with the nature of painting. For the same reasons, we can also find collages made with fragments of photographs, splendid painting-objects composed of boards and pieces of wood of different shapes and textures, and, of special interest, some installations that make use of objects to generate the illusion of pictorial perception, whether they are structures built with wooden crating material, or wooden frames that enclose lines painted on the wall. In the international context, the three series could be placed in the categories of the so-called cold aura languages, such as the NeoGeos, neo-minimalisms and neo-conceptualisms which, since the mid-1980s, have pondered the reduction of form and colors, the imposition of rational order and the presentation of everyday objects without meaningful referents. However, in contrast to the work done in these languages, Viskin’s pieces offer us natural and human presences charged with obvious emotion. These are not figures; they are gestures, lines, textures, sizes, contrasts and even evocative references that a traditional NeoGeo would not allow in his or her work. Even when the Ptlatl are not recreated nor distinguished by their local referents, their identity is explicit for a community. Even when the shapes are geometric, they always retain the trembling of the hand. Even when their reticules are repeated in squares aligned in rigorous, repetitive order, their ends overlap, and they dare to contain names in the human Ptlatl, whether they are written or printed on the pages of telephone directories.
From my point of view, it is these instances of dissent with respect to the traditional NeoGeos that make Boris Viskin’s proposal valuable. It is his daring to refer to objects of regional significance in the knowledge that the internationalists may well consider it inappropriate and completely lacking in contemporaneity. It is his courage to introduce emotion into the cold auras, as in the homages to Brancusi and Mondrian. And, at the same time, it is his contemporary proposal that looks at the petate (the traditional woven palm leaf sleeping mat) in a different way, from its cracks and interstices where no vestige of Mexicanness exists. From the perspective of these past two years, Viskin’s work has journeyed from deconstruction to integration. In the various pieces he deconstructs and constructs the formal obsessions he has manifested since 1995: the line, the relationship between nature and the infinite, and the spiritual expressiveness of abstraction.