In the inferno that engulfed Mexico’s National Film Archive in 1982, Daniel Monroy Cuevas has found a fertile context to explore the paradoxical relationship between fire and image-making processes. While his previous work has dealt with the unfolding of the actual conflagration—its beginning behind a screen, which happened to be showing a fire scene, and incineration of most of the archive’s holdings—Monroy Cuevas’s latest exhibition obsesses around the loss of a series of drawings from 1932 by filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, fated to burn in the same event.
 
The twenty-nine prints on display are negative copies of facsimile graphic works made during the Soviet auteur’s Mexican sojourn. Monroy Cuevas covered a glass sheet with soot, scratched out Eisenstein’s confident pencil strokes, and transferred the entire image, via Magic Tape, to paper. Plants, portraits, self-portraits, contorted human figures, and religious marriages between unalike species emerge from these cinder screens. El martirio del camarista (The Cameraman’s Martyrdom) and El martirio del camarista II, both 2019, which show a man falling (from heaven?) onto a cactus as his tripod camera follows his descent, lead us to the exhibition’s coda: ten untitled prints depicting the persistent tripods in a sequence that gradually zooms in on one camera, which, to no surprise, has caught fire. The apparent fragility of the works’ surfaces—scrapes and crevices abound—hint at the elisions of Eisenstein’s complicated production in Mexico. But what’s most fixating about the work is Monroy Cuevas’s own engrossment with the perils and pleasures of various image-making processes, as well as the sacrifices they entail.

— Fabiola Iza