Jorge Méndez Blake

For this exhibition, curator Daniela Pérez invited artist Jorge Méndez Blake to reinterpret the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo’s collection. Because of the close connection between literature and Méndez Blake’s work, his point of departure was Rufino Tamayo’s book collection. In recent years, Méndez Blake has focused on the phenomenon of the library, and this show is no exception: The wealth of books belonging to Tamayo, a painter from Oaxaca and the museum’s namesake, are reconfigured in the show to convey the idea of a library as thought rendered in architectural form. Shelves of books, some of them placed too high to be reached, mingle with works by artists in the museum’s collection and pieces produced by Méndez Blake specifically for this occasion. The library traces relationships between art and literature, rendering a system of variable narratives, while the wall labels emphasize cognitive and aesthetic relations.

In connection to a piece by Robert Motherwell, for instance, a label mentions “Piel-sonido del mundo” (The Skin and the Sound of the World), a 1976 poem by Octavio Paz that was inspired by Motherwell’s work; that poem was included in the catalogue to Motherwell’s 1991 retrospective exhibition at the Tamayo museum, and it would later inspire Motherwell to make a series of illustrations. Similarly, a connection is made between Motherwell’s painting At Five in the Afternoon, 1949, and Gabriel García Lorca’s poem “La cogida y la muerte” (The Goring and the Death), 1963, in which the title of that canvas appears twenty-eight times.

Through text and imagery, this exhibition generates different yet coexisting narrative universes; and these, in turn, constitute an entire literary cosmos all their own.