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2007
drawing:installation
wall drawing, mixed media on paper
2.8 x 9 m
Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte MUCA Roma, Mexico City, MX
One reason for the artist’s 2007 stay in Mexico City was his interest in muralismo: created in and for the public space, this art not only seeks to merge the formal laws of the avant-garde with a populist mission, but also makes an effort to integrate the archaic art of the indigenous population into the formal vocabulary of modernity. This art-historical interest, bolstered by a bearing on the artist’s own work, was confronted upon arrival with the experience of his lack of familiarity with the country and its real conditions. The work unicamente la verdad, realized, at the invitation of Luis Orozco, at the exhibition building of the university (MUCA Roma), sets the question of the public accessibility of history beyond the canonical grand narratives in a framework that addresses both the artist’s own experience of being a foreigner to the site and the altered role of art in a public sphere shaped by mass media. The work responds to the performative power of the public mural and its propagandistic reflection on history with the fractured structure of an installation of drawings that seeks to give form to the interrelation between available information and ignorance and the statistical excess of history over the individual fates that constitute it. The work is based on material that in itself already articulates the relationship between spectacular visibility and blindness.
The portraits that, interspersed with abstract grid drawings, are installed as the installation’s block of drawings are derived from photographic material taken from old issues of the magazine ALARMA from the nineteen-eighties. Presenting violence with an openness that is shocking to eyes accustomed to the standards of the European press, the magazine—its maxim is unicamente la verdad—reports about criminals and the victims of crimes, about politicians and pop stars and their semi-private lives. Already anonymized by an uninitiated and belated perspective, the material is decontextualized further by the translation into drawings. Ignoring the order imposed by the overarching categories of celebrity and victim, the block of drawings integrates faces depicted in a variety of techniques, whose resistances and distorting effects are explicitly shown as well. The counter-motif of the moiré pattern interrupts, as a sort of pause or image interference, this blind contact with a history illegible to outside eyes enacted by the photography-based figurative drawing. Mounted on two walls that meet at an angle, the two types of drawing interpenetrate. On the left-hand side, the landscape-format grid pictures form a block into which, moving to the right, more and more of the upright portrait drawings—they are half the size of the grid pictures—mingle, until, at the far right, there are only faces. The walls are painted yellow, the signature color of the yellow press, which also dominates ALARMA’s layout. The same color also repeatedly appears in the pictorial ground of the drawings, which are otherwise limited to black and white.