diary February 19, 2018

Fair and Unfair

MEXICO CITY’S ZONA MACO has been resting on its laurels for quite a while. The fifteenth edition, which ran from February 7 to February 11, has become, like many art fairs, lethargic—a state that can easily lead to death. Because of this, I’m eager to pinpoint the subtler but more engaging attractions from inside and, of course, outside the fair.

A satisfyingly loaded point within the supersaturated image carnival that is Zona Maco was its “Sur” section, curated by Brazilian Kiki Mazzucchelli. In this area was Galerie Jerome Poggi’s presentation of Babi Badalov. The artist created banners made

print December 2017

Javier Barrios and Joaquín Segura

“Tres Golpes” (Three Blows) was a pertinent co-creation by two Mexican artists, Javier Barrios and Joaquín Segura, working together for the first time. Commissioned by Paulina Ascencio, the curatorial director of the recently inaugurated Fundación Calosa, their collaboration made for an inaugural exhibition that suggests the foundation has a solid, purposeful future. The founders of Calosa are to be applauded for this effort to bring contemporary art (with a program of discussions, workshops, residencies, and so on, as well as a library) to a public beyond Mexico City—in this case a

print November 2017

“Formasobrefondo”

The duality of figure and ground is a basic concept: necessary to visual perception, and seemingly automatically comprehensible. But what can contemporary art still do with the notion? With work by eighteen diverse artists, “Formasobrefondo” (Figureonground), curated by Willy Kautz, formerly of the Museo Tamayo, presented subtle and intelligent responses to such a seemingly simple question, illuminating the perceptual and cognitive variables in the entire unseen universe that exists behind these three simple words: figure on ground.

The invention of pictorial perspective radically changed the

print September 2017

Alejandro Paz

LIGA is a nonprofit organization that realizes four exhibitions a year along with a series of talks and workshops. Its focus is the relationship between architecture and art. Paradoxically, the gallery’s physical space is extremely limited—a challenge LIGA has met with transcendental results by commissioning on-site works from diverse artists and architects during its six years of operation. But in conceptual and poetic weight, none of the works presented here so far has surpassed the installation/performance currently on view, in which the Guatemalan architect Alejandro Paz has used

print Summer 2017

Pablo Vargas Lugo

Pablo Vargas Lugo Pablo Vargas Lugo’s recent exhibition “Ovipositor” surprisingly paralleled, whether intentionally or not, certain concepts integral to the poststructuralist thought of Jacques Derrida—dissemination and fertility, nakedness and its inescapable vulnerability, presupposed presence and factual appearance. Let’s begin with puncture, which the French philosopher used to denote penetration as a provoked action, as well as living, killing, and hiding. Derrida reflected on the notion of puncturing—an act that is the dialogic, biological, and symbolic center of “Ovipositor.”

picks April 03, 2017

Ximena Garrido-Lecca

For her latest exhibition, Peruvian artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca has turned the gallery into a botany lab. A wooden structure that climbs up three walls like bleachers supports bean plants (grown and nurtured for five months) and an irrigation system made of clay inside a room with a regulated temperature and water supply. The exhibition’s subtitle, “Phaseolus lunatus,” references this species of bean, which dates back to pre-Hispanic times. On a small table facing the botanical structure, a copy of an Edict Against Idolatry (written in 1621) regarding the native tradition of worshiping plants

print January 2017

Miguel Fernández de Castro

An inexplicable insecurity; an empty uncertainty; a strange, ineffable sensation resembling desire—these were the responses triggered in those who entered “NEGRO, NEGRO” (Black, Black), the most recent solo exhibition by Miguel Fernández de Castro. The visitor’s gaze encountered exceedingly smooth domesticated surfaces of things seen and yet not seen: sixteen photographic images and a floor covered with thirty-five semicubic rocks made of condensed minerals (Tiempo lamido [Licked Time], 2016) that had been perforated into whimsical shapes. Fernández de Castro’s work emerges from a familiarity

print December 2015

Miguel Fernández de Castro

Jales (from the Nahuatl word halli, which means “earth”) is the term geologists and mining engineers use to refer to the piles of stones resulting from the explosions used to begin excavation on a mine. For the past three years, Miguel Fernández de Castro has been quietly looking for such traces in old expedition logs and other documents of archaeological explorations of northern Mexico. These topographic notes on wild and largely unfertile lands would often document what sorts of rocks were found on and under the surface of these territories, thereby establishing their potential commercial

print September 2015

Tony Orrico

Tony Orrico’s work is an exploration of the infinite and finite dimensions that inhabit our body—both its maximum potentials and its frail and perishable reality. His performative drawings are configured by countless graphite traces. This exhibition, “Movement Toward  Definition,” focused on the American artist’s recent work, although two 2011 works from his “Penwald” series, 2009–, were also included to establish some context for his current practice.

Waning (Hyde Park, Arts Center, Chicago, IL), 2013, is a mountain-like figure drawn in graphite on a sheet covering almost an entire wall. The

picks August 21, 2014

Vida Yovanovich

In Vida Yovanovich’s latest exhibition, “Grita en silencio/Memoria que se borra” (Shout in Silence/Memory That Vanishes), eight video-and-sound installations deal with the atrocious fate of the victims at Mauthausen, one of the deadliest concentration camps of World War II. Within a muted landscape and seemingly inhospitable architecture, Yovanovich creates a view into a dense yet empty context. Certain that we can only intend to approach the unfathomable if experienced as temporal duration, her almost deathly still films hold watch, capturing a place beyond any possible narrative.

Over the course

print May 2014

Jorge Macchi

One of the first works I ever encountered by Jorge Macchi was Vidas Paralelas (Parallel Lives), 1998, in which two rectangular pieces of glass with almost identical patterns of cracks are placed next to one another on a simple white platform. The broken pieces of glass exuded a timid but irrefutable silence from within the edges of their fragmentation. There seemed to be a sort of premonition hidden in the temporal disjunction between the two panes, each of which condensed the obscure singularity of its originary event. One of the two panes had actually experienced the “original rupture,” a

picks February 01, 2014

“A Place in Two Dimensions”

For “A Place in Two Dimensions”—the inaugural exhibition at the institution’s new space—Patrick Charpenel has juxtaposed fifty works from the collection of Eugenio López Alonso with eight works by Fred Sandback. The topics that run through the exhibition bind the works in an elusive yet unwavering fashion. In Francis Alÿs’s drawings “In a Given Situation,” 2010, geometric forms and language rendered in soft colors evoke displacement and fragmentation, while Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s series “Equilibres,” 1984–86, probe issues of balance and time. Other topics that are addressed include how

picks July 24, 2013

Luis Felipe Ortega

Anyone who’s spent time with Luis Felipe Ortega’s videos knows that behind his images lie fragmented, intimate stories imbued with a complex sense of extended spatial time. Poet Tomás Segovia might have described that sense already: “Nothing, when in its place, is ugly / So self-assured, this light / comes in through the window / To sanction this place and how it is arranged / so unabashedly entrenched. / And, in my silence / I let myself be blessed by the joy / Admiring with no residue / the place and time of things / Rather than things in themselves.”

In this exhibition, “Anotaciones para una

print May 2013

Laura Lima

Homem=carne/Mulher=carne—Puxador Paisagem (Man=Flesh/ Woman=Flesh—Landscape Puller), 1999/2013, an installation/performance by Brazilian artist Laura Lima, was recently shown at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporâneo. It incorporated a motif that the artist has been working with for many years, most recently at the Biennale de Lyon in 2011. There, in Homem=carne/Mulher=carne— Puxador (Pilares) (Man=Flesh/Woman=Flesh—Puller [Pillars]), 1998/2011, a naked man with two straps on his shoulders pulled against a complicated network of long black belts wrapped around the

interviews April 17, 2013

Estudio Macías Peredo

Guadalajara, Mexico–based architects Magui Peredo and Salvador Macías of Estudio Macías Peredo recently won a competition for the Pabellón Eco 2013 at the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City. The spatial and aesthetic configuration of the winning entry not only expands the concept of what a pavilion could be, but also reevaluates the function of the museum’s courtyard. Here Peredo and Macías speak about their intentions for this work and their interest in architectural integration. The pavilion is on view until May 26, 2013.

WE’VE ULTIMATELY UNDERSTOOD this proposal as the placement of

picks March 06, 2013

“Las apariencias engañan: los vestidos de Frida Kahlo”

Given the never-ending interest in Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and her work, it would seem almost impossible to come up with anything new and meaningful to add to the interpretation of her oeuvre. On the other hand, devising an exhibition that focuses exclusively on the striking wardrobe that formed the basis for her exotic image, while disregarding her highly recognized pictorial work, would almost seem an act of curatorial suicide. Nonetheless, the exhibition “Las apariencias engañan: Los vestidos de Frida Kahlo” (Appearances Are Deceiving: The Dresses of Frida Kahlo), curated by Circe

picks February 10, 2013

“El instinto olvidado”

“El instinto olvidado” (The Forgotten Instinct) is an exhibition co-organized by the Parisian dealer Jocelyn Wolff and LABOR’s Pamela Echeverría. For the first part of the show, Wolff has installed a series of works in Mexico City, and this June, Echeverría will install a show at Wolff’s gallery. The current gathering is powerful and bold, tracing delicate and suggestive links between the work of five artists from different nations and generations: William Anastasi, Guillaume Leblon, Hans Schabus, Francisco Tropa, and Franz Erhard Walther. The show most successfully mines the relationship between

picks December 18, 2012

Tania Candiani

Tania Candiani’s first solo museum show coincides with the reopening of the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, an old San Diego convent that had been closed for in-depth restorations over the past two years. Her installations, conceived over that two-year period, address the very process (and limits) of restoration in the realm of language: in writing, listening, and translation exercises involving the sounds—both “readable” and “writable” in a Barthesian sense—that survive in the written word.

Two of these six interdisciplinary and multimedia works stand out due to their expressive and conceptual coherence.

picks October 03, 2012

Claudia Hans

“Cuando una persona muere…” (When Somebody Dies), 2011, is the title of one of the three photographic projects in Claudia Hans’s latest solo exhibition, “The End.” The award-winning series “Morido,” 2010, and “Imaginarios de Dios” (Imagining God), 2012, help to consolidate the show’s aesthetic and thematic texture. The three featured series consist of seemingly innocent and playful small-format black-and-white portraits of children responding to questions and interacting with situations posed by Hans concerning God and death. For example, in “Cuando una persona muere…,” she asked children to

Marcela Quiroz