Pequod Co. is proud to return to Art Basel Miami now presenting a three-artist show in the NOVA sector.
Sexuality in the Chimera of the End is the proposal of Pequod Co. curated by Andrea Valencia Aranda for NOVA 2024, which brings together works by Javier Barrios (Guadalajara, 1989), Elsa-Louise Manceaux (Paris, 1985), and Leo Marz (Zapopan, 1979) under their explorations of sexuality at a time of innumerable crises and transitions ranging from the cultural to the affective.
On the horizon of a possible end (environmental collapse, reorganization of social structures, profound technological changes), images and visions emerge in the work of Barrios, Manceaux, and Marz that take place between eros-thanatos, pleasure and apocalypse, sex and self-destruction. If we take as a premise that "[s]ex has always been the focal point where, besides the future of our species, our ‘truth’ as human subjects has been tied up", as proposed by Michel Foucault, what do these images tell us about ourselves in the face of a moment that puts our very existence at risk?
The work of Javier Barrios presents apocalyptic scenes of a fictitious world where drawings of death and flowers–the sexual organs of a plant–meet in a battle of creation and destruction. In the drawing, as well as in the screen at the center of the booth, the orchid fights cosmic battles while wondering–looking at itself in a mirror–about its own sexuality, its own desire. In addition, one of Barrios' most recent projects, presented for the first time, is a ceramic piece: a funerary urn designed to contain ashes from the crematorium that shows images of demonic and protective faces that seek to insert art beyond public, institutional or private spaces, and to situate it in the ritual sphere. Thus, art can continue with or without an observer after our end.
For NOVA, Manceaux developed the painting series Heteros in Crisis, which proposes a shift in the understanding and sensibility of a subject that, until recently, was no more than the default in culture and social agreements, and is now under profound scrutiny: the heterosexual. In these paintings, she humorously and ironically critiques the iconography of the “painter of love,” Marc Chagall, alongside stock photo imagery and medieval drawings found in various Apocalypse manuscripts: bodies lying wounded, dead, reclining—or in therapy?—witnessing the end. Through the use of diverse techniques and materials on canvases that combine different painting qualities (sheens, shades, "raw" cotton and linen canvases, gesso embossing, acrylic, egg tempera, or silver point), the artist seeks to capture the undefined essence and atmosphere of contemporary sensibility, foretelling the collapse of a paradigm.
In the series Untitled Bodies, Leo Marz creates indecipherable scenes and fragmented and intuited corporealities–legs, hands, and gazes–that situate the body in a time of technological confusion that the artist has called “the End of Old Times”. The theatricality of the scenes and gestures that are barely perceived, echo minimalism and the deep study of the line. The outline of the figures is formed by superimposed layers of paint that form strata and bas-reliefs to which he applies gold leaf, evoking the sensuality of drawing and the skin in his choice of color. As his source of images, Marz reviews Internet forums from which he takes notes and sketches among the infinite repertoire of entries and comments, emphasizing the physical and interpretative distance of the body and the context. Through his paintings, Marz ponders: What happens when the body becomes an interface?
Andrea Valencia Aranda
The booth, titled “Sexuality in the Chimera of the End”, will be at the Miami Convention Center from Wednesday, December 4th to Sunday, December 8th. Private days are Wednesday and Thursday; public days are Friday onwards. For more information about Art Basel Miami Beach, please visit https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach/at-the-show.
