Seis, seis, seis.

Hace apenas unos cuantos meses, el 23 de marzo para ser más precisos, Plutón ingresó en el signo de Acuario. Y aunque ahora, retrógrado, Plutón ha vuelto a Capricornio, pronto volverá a Acuario para permanecer allí durante veinte años. Esto puede traducirse como el infierno (Plutón, Hades) en el cielo (Acuario, el copero de los dioses, el aire y la altura, el éter). Y esto es lo que vi, como si de una carta astral se tratara, en los lienzos de Marco Aviña que componen esta exposición. El inframundo ascendiendo a la bóveda celeste.

¿Astrología? Quizá. Puesto que una constelación supone mirar el cielo pictóricamente: trazar con estrellas la imagen de un mito. Y Aviña, que ha visto el final de las imágenes, esboza constelaciones desde una visión escatológica: Seis, seis, seis, el número de la bestia que le da título, es una clara referencia al Apocalipsis de San Juan, a la vez que un guiño rockero.

Acuario, el aguador, es Ganimedes: el copero de los dioses. El bello joven que ascendió a los cielos raptado por el águila de Zeus y luego transformado en constelación. ¿Podría Jim Morrison, esa estrella, ese bello joven arrebatado por los dioses en la flor de la edad, ser un nuevo Ganimedes? Morrison es el Rey Lagarto, y por lo tanto una deidad ctónica. Un anticristo. Su ascenso a los cielos sólo puede entenderse como parte del asalto vandálico de los dioses infernales: el retorno de Luzbel, la venganza de la imagen sobre el dios de lo irrepresentable, la victoria del becerro de oro, la instauración celeste del reino de Satán cuyo rostro triunfal ya se grafitea entre las nubes.

Quizá prefiera yo esta versión del Juicio Final, pues quizá no haya más alta justicia que la del gozo de ser y sobre estos lienzos celestes, estrellados y nubosos, que tradicionalmente suelen ser escenarios de alta teología, imágenes de toda suerte de procedencia, ya académica, ya popular, liberadas de cualquier categoría moral y jerarquización estética, y sin mayor afán de trascendencia, se regocijan en la dicha de su propia aparición. Pues aunque hay cierta insistencia simbólica en su iconografía, y por momentos las figuras parecieran constelarse en alegorías, se trata de alegorías y símbolos mutantes, inestables, inciertos, fugaces. ¿Qué relación hay entre las pastillas rojas y azules de Matrix que aparecen en una de las pinturas con la matriz preñada de esa diosa de la Tierra que protagoniza otro lienzo? Como las nubes en el cielo en las que apenas uno cree reconocer un rostro cuando ya ese rostro se transforma en un paisaje y ese paisaje en un animal y ese animal ya es sólo una nube que el viento disipa y ya no hay nubes, sólo cielo, así sus posibles significados.

¿Pero si no es el infierno de las imágenes el que ha tomado por asalto el cielo sino el cielo el que ha caído? También es posible mirar las estrellas en un charco y los antiguos nahuas llamaban cielos de abajo a los estratos del inframundo. ¿Anábasis o catábasis? “Como es arriba es abajo”, reza un viejo dicho hermético y estos lienzos poseen cierta cualidad de espejo e incluyen su propio revés y son su propio doble. “Caer fue solo / la ascensión a lo hondo”, dice José Ángel Valente en un poema sobre Ícaro.

El vértigo que generan estas pinturas radica en que, no sólo su fugitivo significado, sino sus figuras mismas orbitan en torno a su disolución. Las imágenes (pero más que imágenes, quizá deberíamos decir recuerdos de imágenes) aparecen sólo para vaticinar su desaparición inminente y su conversión en nubes. Los colores estridentes se revelan gradaciones hacia el terrible blanco final que insiste en las nubes que coronan o enmarcan sus fugaces epifanías. Lo que está ya no está. Como las estrellas en el cielo cuyo pasado es la luz de nuestro presente. No hay futuro pero el pasado está por venir a vengarse. Astrología postpunk. La estrella de Mario Bros lleva el halo de los muertos: Game Over. “This is the end, beautiful friend”, canta el Rey Lagarto. Pero el disco gira. Y en su loop la canción vuelve a comenzar.

Luis Felipe Fabre, Ciudad de México, 19 de julio del 2023

Motlazohtlaliz ayocmo pepetzca
Your love ceased to be iridescent

This proposal aims to alert us to an increasingly evident environmental phenomenon: the scarcity of water. At the same time, it tries to include us in a discourse that is both aesthetic and of social value through objects of domestic use (most of the time associated with the rural world). The use of the comal (hotplate pan), the metate (flat stone), the chair, the water filter as pictorial-sculptural supports and the use of acrylic colors seeks to lead us to this act, where water is not only the motif but also an intrinsic participant in this discussion.

Transcendentally, the artist’s origin directs us to a territory, Milpa Alta, geographical scenario where this dilemma occurs today in an obvious way; Malacachtepec Momoxco. Today Milpa Alta is the second largest delegation in territory in the municipalities that make up Mexico City.

Milpa Alta is a bastion of wealth in natural and cultural resources, of Nahua origin, its inhabitants have preserved this legacy thanks to their knowledge in the management of natural resources. However, today they are at high risk of being lost, the region is in constant tension, resisting the siege by private interests and the state, the growth of the unplanned urban sprawl, among other factors, in addition to the constant struggle for the recognition of communal lands and respect for their community normative systems.

It is in this panorama that the objects mentioned are not only witnesses of a disappearing culture, but active participants in a dilemma in which we are all invited to participate.

This exhibition also invites us to reflect on the search for healing on a global and personal level, on this human need to stop the disaster we have created in the world. It is no coincidence then, that we can notice the resurgence of ancient ideas from Mesoamerica, the Tao and Buddhism as a healing tool; ancient currents that are becoming part of our consciousness since in the West, with its industrial forms and consumerism, we have not been able to find resolution to the condition in which we find ourselves.

Thus, through fables and metaphors, Mexican cosmogony explains to us the origin of the universe. Tláloc, the god of rain; Chicomecóatl, goddess of fertility; Huehuecóyotl, god of the arts; converge in this space where the comal, the metate, the molcajete and the chair become important elements to tell these stories. The images on the comales are born organically from the contact of water with paint; rabbits, butterflies, horses, fish, constellations, the moon, the sea and the earth; all giving texture and inviting us to this discussion.

Fernando Palma Rodríguez (San Pedro Atocpan, Mexico, 1957) lives and works in the agricultural region of Milpa Alta, on the outskirts of Mexico City, where he co-directs Calpulli Tecalco AC, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of the Nahua language and agriculture. Recently, he participated in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), MoMA PS1, New York (2018); he had a retrospective at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (2017). His work has been included in exhibitions at Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2021); Gwangju Biennial, Korea (2021); Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2021); Taipei Biennial, Taiwan (2020); Ballroom Marfa, USA (2019); FRAC des Pays de la Loire, France (2016); Nottingham Contemporary, England (2015); the Biennial of the Americas, Denver, Colorado (2015); Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Mexico (2014); and SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2014). His work is part of collections of the Tate, London; LACMA, Los Angeles; Kadist, San Francisco; Museo Amparo, Puebla and MUAC, Mexico City.

Gaga is pleased to announce Alex Hubbard’s fifth exhibition at the gallery.

Alex Hubbard (b. 1975 Toledo, Oregon) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work encompasses video art and painting, exploring the boundaries of each via a cross-examination that invigorates both media in new and inventive ways. Constructed along parallel lines, his videos and paintings explore composition, mass, color and depth of images in unexpected ways. Avoiding a single point of focus, Hubbard constructs his videos in layers, engulfing the viewer with bold colors, performative gestures and evolving, all-over compositions in which movement is multi-directional and time appears to be non-linear. Often described as ‘moving paintings’, the videos are a record of physical creation and destruction, with the hand of the artist tangible, and sometimes visible, in the frame.

In counterpoint to the videos, Hubbard’s paintings often suggest a mechanical means of production. Fields of color in fiberglass and resin are interrupted with richly pooled, dripped and poured paint. Working with fast-drying materials, such as epoxy and latex, the artist is forced to act quickly, embracing chance happenings and reveling in the autonomy of his chosen media. Such anti-hierarchical materials and techniques provide a corollary to the DIY aesthetic of the video works. And through this deconstruction every traditional opposition of the formal language of painting is opened up: figure and ground, material and illusionistic depth, the horizontality of production and the verticality of display.

Recent solo exhibitions include Staircase Descending A Nude, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Waldmannstrasse, Zurich 2022; Alex Hubbard, Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, China 2021; Alex Hubbard: The Corner of the Table, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, USA 2019; Projectors, Gaga, Los Angeles, USA, 2019. Recent group exhibitions include Dirty Protest: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum 2019; Pacific Rim Job, Telles Fine Art, 2018; Selections from the Marciano Collection, Marciano Foundation, 2018; Social Surfaces, Artist’s Space, NY 2017.

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.

Gaga is pleased to present Кризис Безобразия, Sam Pulitzer’s third show at the gallery.

This exhibition consists of 13 graphic works presented under the Russian-language title, Кризис Безобразия. When translated into the English language, the phrase means “Crisis of Ugliness.” It is taken from a set of essays written by Soviet aesthetic philosopher Mikhail Lifshitz, a colleague of György Lukács, in the eventful year of 1968. Lifshitz develops Georgy Plekhanov’s critique of 1912’s salon d’automne as a “crise de la laideur,” a judgement which borrows critic Camille Mauclair’s earlier negative assessment of the Fauves’ artistic achievement, into a philippic against the historical fortunes of Cubism and Pop Art. The benefit of keeping the title in Russian is the richness of Безобразия which bears greater nuance than the mere unsightliness that both ‘ugliness’ or ‘laideur’ convey. Broken down into Без and образия, it suggests an “image-lessness” of ethical dimensions in a sense closer to the German theological term, Bildlosigkeit. (Note: I am paraphrasing translator David Riff’s discussion of Lifshitz’s text.)

In the essay, “Myth and Reality: The Legend of Cubism,” Lifshitz’s claims that, while it constitutes “a protest [that reflects] the presence of a huge stratum of people hungry to see a new heaven and a new earth,” Cubism is tempered by a social deficit in which, “instead of fighting to change the real forms of life’s ongoing process, [the cubist] breaks the forms in which it is perceived.” In favor of a theory of realism of which he was a partisan, Lifshitz further opines—

The entire lineage of depicting reality in its visible forms, and especially in forms of life as the basis of the beautiful, is unacceptable to those who worship the kingdom of the dead. […] The question of truth is cast aside entirely. ‘We all know’, said Picasso himself, ‘that Art is not truth.’ Cubism consciously creates unprecedented combinations of form without guaranteeing that they will resemble anything at all in our ordinary, sinful world or even in the otherworldly realm of pure form. ‘Art is a lie’. ‘Those lies are necessary for our mental selves’.

Naturally, such a “crisis”—one would be hard-pressed to claim that Lifshitz’s dismissal of North Atlantic aesthetic modernity as anything other than polemic—has fallen not only out of fashion but out of historical favor. The war of position between one constellation of, give or take, aesthetic modernity and political tradition against that of another has been unceremoniously settled in a social program of shock therapy far more unsightly than the Campbell soup cans that came to serve as the one-dimensional emblems of a universal dream realized. But, that, too, was many booms and busts ago; so much so, that such a memory itself seems a pathological distraction for a contemporary society that is as pious in its embrace of novelty as it is novel in its embrace of piety.

The graphic works gathered under such a weighty title were produced in the afterlife of such an antiquated state of affairs as they are delivered into a present ostensibly free of any practical obligation to the historical beyond revision. As images, they depict, in a standard poster format and against a monotone red background, discrete objects that have been modified in one way or another so that they might communicate to a disinterested observer that they represent much more than what they are—even though, in truth, they are only just so. If the kingdom of the dead were located somewhere between a relative’s attic and an auction house, ignoring for a moment the charnel houses that punctuate history, this visual detritus would be found laying in wait for redemption as aureoles of broken fate.

Luis Felipe Fabre
Pasiphae

A dance: this is what I remember. A dance as dream, a hallucination, a trance, this is what I remember from the staging I saw in 2003. But, what did I see? What do I see now? More than the artworks inside the gallery I see the impossible: remnants of a dream, an archeological site uncovering not a fragment in history but a myth, an illusion of a queen’s tomb. Her gleaming burial dowry is proof of it happening, still happens sometimes, that same bloody orgy between gods, mortals, animals and monsters.

It is said the labyrinth was originally a dance. Daedalus’ construction of a dance floor for Ariadne is narrated by Homer. In some versions of the myth Theseus, leaving the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur, dances the intricate crane dance mimicking it’s own secret. That’s what I saw. That’s what I remember: a labyrinthine dance.

Who would’ve thought the ambitious search of Sir Arthur John Evans, the amateur archeologist to whom we owe the discovery and, in great measure, the invention of Minoan culture while excavating Knossos at the beginning of the 20th century, would appear years later in Mexico City. And is only through theatre’s rarest moments, theatre in alliance with poetry, where myth emerges from it’s darkest strata to a place the archeologist did not seem to arrive but where Juan José Gurrola’s mise en scene of Henri de Montherlant’s beautiful dramatic poem did. I saw Pasiphae. I swear I saw queen Pasiphae dancing in a labyrinth of terror and desire.

A labyrinth? Doesn’t it appear, according to the narrative’s structure, after the Minotaur’s birth and built under King Minos instruction in order to confine it? Montherlant’s text chants the prior moment: his poetry is the music leading Pasiphae’s steps into the tragic episode, right before her destiny is fulfilled and has shaped it as her desire from which the Minotaur would be created. But Gurrola knew that in myth there is no before or after, it’s all there happening simultaneously. He knew Pasiphae’s steps are the labyrinth and in its center one finds the desired bull, in other words, her monstrous desire, meaning herself.

Pasiphae: daughter of Helios, sun; sister of Circe, sorcerer; aunt of Medea, sorcerer as well and enamored and tragic; wife of King Minos, daughter-in-law of Europa, the princess abducted by Zeus’ white bull and great granddaughter of Io, the disgraced princess converted into a cow for her love of Zeus; mother of Ariadne, Phaedra and Asterion, the Minotaur; but mostly and to everyone, herself: no one as such as she, Pasiphae, and the attainment of her desire. At least this is how she is described in Montherlant’s text and in Raul Falcó’s translation and in Gurrola’s interpretation, in the gleaming copper and bronce of James Matcalf and Ana Pellicer, in Vera Larrosa’s body on the first staging Gurrola made in 1983 and in Katia Tirado’s body in 2003.

Looking at Gurrola’s, Metcalf’s, Pellicer’s “La Máquina de Dédalo” (Daedalus’ Machine) a gleam of bronce sparkles: doesn’t Pasiphae turn into a bull instead of a cow as she inserts herself into it? Pasiphae is the cow and the bull and her body a labyrinth where in it’s center the Minotaur stands: Ariadne’s string, another entanglement, brings to mind an umbilical cord.

Looking at “La Máquina de Dédalo” a spark of copper shines: Pasiphae’s disguise as cow is the Troyan horse of desire.

Pasiphae, who’s name means wide-shining for all, of all, in other words, the moon. The bull’s and moon’s affairs are a labyrinth as old as night. And sometimes the moon as well has horns: waxing crescent, waning crescent. I’d like to see Metcalf’s and Pellicer’s copper and bronce in the moonlight. I’m sure that still now they could reflect Eros’ primeval beams.

PASIPHAE
Juan José Gurrola, James Metcalf and Ana Pellicer at Gaga from July 22nd through September 4th, 2021. Research by: Angélica García y Mauricio Marcin. Special thanks to Rosa Gurrola, Patricia Sloane and Colección y Archivo de Fundación Televisa.