Is a city its own bibliography more so than its architecture? Every city is a palimpsest. Erected above its buildings, squares, transportation systems, ruins, monuments, which shape a city, another city rises made out of poems, rumors, paintings, chronicles, photographs, stories, films, engravings and conversations. Or rather, one and the other, not being one and the other but imperceptibly, they conform one same city, multiple, diverse, unstable, Babelic and relentless: spatial and imaginary at the same time and in many moments at once. Such is what Historia y leyendas de las calles de México, the first exhibition in Mexico by Mexican-American artist Raul Guerrero (b. 1945) makes us notice.

Made in 1994 as the result of one of the artist’s visit to what was still known as DF, the twelve canvases that make up the series (of which eleven are shown in the gallery) could be understood more than as paintings as catalogues or fascicles of a discovery: volumes, as they insist on proclaiming themselves. Book covers of impossible publications, as non-existent as they are true, of literarily hermetic works; covers announcing a text the intended reader cannot seem to open. Twelve volumes of an illegible work, like Mexico City. Twelve covers for an enigma or twelve enigmas for a city.

The bibliographic starting point of this project (and in a certain way iconographic as well, together with some film scenes from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, and Mexican caricature) is made up of those publications by nineteenth-century authors (Luis González Obregón, Juan de Dios Peza, Artemio del Valle Arizpe) who collected the legendary stories of the city trying to give them a historical framework, and whose popular editions, to which the title of the exhibition alludes to and the typography of each painting reproduces, were very successful in the 20th century through its sale on newsstands. This is revealed by the cover image of Tomo III, where, framed by the pages of the newly acquired book, you can see the sale of magazines as a scenic background for some local beat poets who are probably more influenced by Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, or the dark testimonies of William Burroughs’s time in Colonia Roma, than by the colonial legends displayed in the pages that surround them as a textual architecture they cannot read.

On the other hand, the topographical starting point of this trip, which is reported in Tomo I, takes place at a dinner in Polanco, where, from the smoke that emanates from a full ashtray, rises the ghostly image of Tina Modotti, double agent, artist and spy, foreign Malinche whose alien gaze invented one of the possible gazes that became even more national than the pretended national ones. What or who does he see, or through the eyes of whom does he see, he who claims to see Mexico City? What would our image of Tenochtitlan be without the textual look of Hernán Cortés in his Cartas de Relación and other chroniclers of the Indies? What came first, the native or the visitor? Tina Modotti becomes, in this Divine Mexican Comedy in twelve volumes, a kind of Virgil who will guide Raúl Guerrero through the joyful hell of Anahuac. From Polanco to the infernal circles of the historic center, crossing Reforma and passing through the Museum of Anthropology and the Zona Rosa, to end in this fascinating Tomo XII, where the image of a traveling musician is superimposed with the reproduction of an iconic photograph by Modotti. Again: what do we see when we see? Is that what we saw? Where? In what book? Do we see or read?

Twelve postcards that the sphinx Raúl Guerrero turns into enigmas: an anti-travel guide: twelve covers that are twelve doors to get lost in the streets of Mexico.


Luis Felipe Fabre

Raul Guerrero (b. 1945, Brawley, California) has presented solo exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Potts, Los Angeles (2018); Ortuzar Projects, New York (2018); Air de Paris (project space), Paris, France (2014); Athenaeum Music and Arts Library, San Diego, California (2001, 2007, and 2013); CUE Art Foundation, New York (2010); Long Beach Museum of Art, California (1977); and San Francisco Art Institute, California (1977). In 1989, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a retrospective exhibition of his work. Guerrero has been the recipient of an NEA Photography Fellowship (1979) and the San Diego Art Prize (2006). He lives and works in San Diego, California.

Installation
views

House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México
House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México
House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México
House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México
House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México
House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México
House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México

Works

House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México

Raul Guerrero
Tomo I: Horacio, 1994
Oil on canvas
60 x 48 inches
152.4 x 121.9 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México

Raul Guerrero
Tomo II: Paseo de la Reforma (Chapultepec), 1994
Oil on canvas
40 x 40 inches
101.6 x 101.6 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México

Raul Guerrero
Tomo III: Reforma con Calzada Melchor Ocampo, 1994
Oil on canvas
40 x 50 inches
101.6 x 127 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México

Raul Guerrero
Tomo VI: 16 de Septiembre con 5 de Febrero, 1994
Oil on canvas
60 x 60 inches
152.4 x 152.4 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México

Raul Guerrero
Tomo VII: Guatemala (Catedral), 1994
Oil on canvas
48 x 42 inches
121.9 x 106.7 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México

Raul Guerrero
Tomo VIII: Avenida Pino Suarez, 1994
Oil on canvas
40 x 48 inches
101.6 x 121.9 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México

Raul Guerrero
Tomo IX: Allende con Ecuador, 1994
Oil on canvas
40 x 40 inches
101.6 x 101.6 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México

Raul Guerrero
Tomo X: Bolivar, 1994
Oil on canvas
60 x 40 inches
152.4 x 101.6 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México

Raul Guerrero
Tomo XII: La Merced, 1994
Oil on canvas
60 x 40 inches
101.6 x 101.6 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México

Raul Guerrero
Tomo IV: Reforma (La Diana), 1994
Oil on canvas
36 x 40 inches
91.4 x 101.6 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Historia y Leyendas de las Calles de México

Raul Guerrero
Tomo XI: Isabel la Catolica, 1994
Oil on linen
40 x 47.99 inches
101.6 x 121.9 cm