Viewers entering Radamés “Juni” Figueroa’s exhibition “Sabroso Veneno” (Sweet Poison) might have wondered if they’d walked into a local cantina by mistake. The room was set up with eight small square tables, each draped in a pink tablecloth embroidered with the exhibition’s name. Folding metal chairs bore the logo of Indio, a popular Mexican beer. To the right, a stage, also painted pink (with accents of pale blue and yellow) jutted out from the wall, rising a foot or so from the ground. Two wide pedestals flanking the stage might have served to display sculpture—or performing bodies.

Hanging

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