For the 2024 edition of Independent, Galería Agustina Ferreyra and Pequod Co. present a joint project with works by Paloma Contreras Lomas (Mexico, 1991), Tobías Dirty (Argentina, 1990), and Cristóbal Gracia (Mexico, 1987). The presentation will focus on the artists’ shared ideas around personal and historical narratives, colonization and decolonization processes, fantasy genres, and geopolitical relations and influences.
Paloma Contreras Lomas (Mexico City, 1991) and Cristóbal Gracia (Mexico City, 1987) are two of the most promising Mexican voices of their generation. Both former members of Biquini Wax EPS, a prominent collective and artist non-profit space, provided visibility to a whole ecosystem of Mexican young artists in their early stages through curatorial projects, publications, and experimental initiatives.
The work of Paloma Contreras Lomas extends to media such as video, writing, drawing, performance, and collective production. Her practice combines literary fiction with personal narratives to address several issues, such as declassifying art, decolonizing science fiction, and the all-encompassing terror of the Mexican Catholic middle class.
Along these lines, Cristóbal Gracia’s recent work has been focused on the mechanisms that Western power has imposed (with strong references to his own Mexican post-colonial context), in the conception of history, canons, and aesthetics, and in an academic research and artistic output of new possibilities on re-reading their timelines not in a linear way but as a rhizomatic network of entities that should be presented in a non-balanced hierarchy.
Lastly, through the aesthetic influence of surrealism, queer counterculture, and fantasy genres, the work of Tobías Dirty investigates the complex relationship between gender, bodies, and sexuality as forms of cognitive labor involved in contemporary subjectivities. Dirty is interested in creating chaotic environments through the hybridization of disciplines in order to appropriate the exhibition space through the design of playful, lysergic, and erotic performative experiences that critically distort consciousness, inviting the viewer to dilute the colonial binary between the body and the mind, and creating non-linear narratives influenced by drag, BDSM, body modification, and the conflicting imaginaries proposed by queer-trans-feminism.
Paloma Contreras Lomas
For Independent, Paloma Contreras presents her latest body of work that aims to create a bridge between her video practice and a recently adopted medium by introducing us to a new layer of her visual imaginary through a series of oil paintings.
With a solid background in drawing and an inclination towards political caricature, Contreras revisits characters and scenarios akin to comics and cartoons well known to her practice while allowing herself to delve into the depths of storytelling in the form of compositions, where she carries on with her reflection of landscape as an entity that serves as her main motif of historical memory.
The paintings that comprise this series are based on stills from videos, story board sketches, and recurrent spectres in the artist’s language that repeatedly arise to mirror historical subjects, lovers, or relatives she has never met. These references are a resource from which she unfolds numerous historical and personal narratives, evoking portraits close to Mexican thrillers to discuss how exoticization mechanisms, colonial guilt, and the constructed identity of the middle class work in Mexico. As her research constantly involves proximity to various groups or localities, Contreras’ work discloses affective bonds and, many times, shows an autobiographical projection.
Cristóbal Gracia
I first became interested in plaster casts while I was working in Italy for a show in late 2019. I came across a workshop that produced these objects. Amongst the hundreds of casts, I found some shelves that hosted a particular group: the David, the Venus de Milo, the Virgin Mary, a Buda, and a Mussolini, among others. These characters didn’t have much of a relationship with each other. However, what united them was their aesthetic and materiality—the white, pristine plaster. After spending a few months in Italy, I returned to Mexico only to move to New Haven, CT, to start my MFA at Yale, the same university where Joseph Albers destroyed most of the Yale collection of plaster casts, while the architect Paul Rudolph rescued the remaining ones and installed them in his concrete brutalist building of Art & Architecture.
This anecdote caught my attention because it represented something very contemporary and that we are still dealing with today: a dispute over historical narratives and how to relate to history and tradition. While Albers is an example of the avant-garde, Rudolph represents the eagerness of American modernity to be part of the canon of western civilization, and all of this was being mediated by these casts. I then started doing deeper research into the tradition of plaster casts. It is also worth mentioning that this anecdote gave birth to a project I presented in Art Basel 2022, Positions: Ongoing Dreams of a Baroque Totality.
The use of plaster casts was already present in ancient Rome: they were used on bronze statues to produce marble copies of different sizes. However, it was until modernity that they were employed as tools applied in the construction of the notion of art in its modern understanding, conceived in the 18th and 19th centuries. They also helped to create and massify an ideal of a dominant Western Culture expressed under a single aesthetic, the classical canon. This was achieved with the aid of ideological apparatuses such as universities, museums, and imperial archeology.
Archeology had a great impact on the production of plaster casts since it engendered an eagerness to reconstruct the dismembered body of antiquity from scattered fragments to try to recuperate the “lost original." At the same time, museums had the possibility to recreate a perfect and linear chronological universal historicity from ruined fragments to a reimagined perfect hyperreal totality at the service of imperial nationalisms.
The 20th century brought with it the decline of plaster casts. The causes varied: from the World Wars to the economic growth of America, revolutions from the Global South, and paradoxically, the very original interest and industry of the casts. New archaeological discoveries were followed by their
overproduction, and museums were eager to acquire them. However, they became more ambitious, but also more problematic, as they would arrive broken or divided into hundreds of pieces, with the impossibility of being correctly reassembled.
This overproduction broke the illusion of a historicist linear chronology. A great example of this is the 1987 article from the NY Times: “PLASTER CASTS OF STATUES: FROM STORAGE INTO VOGUE”. The article explained the destiny of the once-admired collection of the MET, a museum that opened its doors pretending to be the largest museum of plaster casts. However, by the 1940´s, the collection was abandoned in a warehouse. The article narrates that the casts were in “crowded rows, their faces chipped, cracked, and black with the accumulated grime of decades”.
My project starts here. I want to work towards that moment of failure and exaggerate it. I want to imagine and exhibit the point where these ideological tools were hidden from plain sight because they were not needed anymore, just like any other tool that must be put away when the construction is finished.
The plaster casts had already built an ideological and institutional framework that still operates today. The crowded rows break the historical linearity that casts created, bringing a possibility for different narratives while not canceling past ones, but contradicting them, since every rupture is also a continuity.The cracks open a space within the dominant canon, allowing its transformation from within. The dust and grime are microparticles of solid matter from a discarded history in constant movement that, when deposited and accumulated on the casts, modify their shape and meaning, like an oyster that defends itself against a parasite that perforates its shell, gradually covering it with mother-of-pearl.
My sculpture is a baroque pearl with a shell made of brass, a material typically used in jewelry. Fragments of classic plaster casts are covered with layers and layers of exaggerated dust, whose particles will not be microscopic but macroscopic, and the size of this pearl is not that of a natural one but on a human scale. The manufacture of the macroscopic dust will come from an endless number of crushed objects.
My interest in pearls is not an aesthetic one, but a processual one and a starting point to develop into concepts such as the Baroque, historical narratives, and parasitic relationships. The term “Baroque” comes from the Portuguese barrôco, or irregular pearl. My approach to the baroque exceeds its artistic temporality and follows a contemporary Latin American tradition led by the Marxist thinker Bolívar Echeverría and the poet Severo Sarduy, who understand it as a stage of a suspended civilizational crisis, a subversive ethos that defies the established canon and understands modernity as a multiplicity of simultaneous narratives in conflict.
A pearl is created when a parasite drills the shell of an oyster and is coated with nacre. The philosopher Michel Serres argues that parasitism creates uneven and complex systems of exchange that function as the production of change in the same relation, showing that each parasite in turn is also a host. The prefix para, in parasite, means on the side, next to. It is not on/in the thing, but on its relation. Communication depends on parasites, while the parasite communicates and mediates it also transforms. This disruption of a message is not entirely negative, positive, or neutral. Its value of production can only be decided in retrospective and on a case-by-case basis. It even allows us to accept failure as a productive mode of production.
A system is a set of messages; in order to hear the message alone, one would have to be identical to the sender. If everything worked in perfect balance, with no loss or gain, there would be no need for communication. It would be a system entirely closed to the rest of the world. Parasites are the basis of intersubjectivity, of being together.
An adjective commonly used to describe the baroque is excess. Unlike predators, parasites do not play in a simple food chain. The parasite needs the excess, redirecting the host’s surplus energies and causing the system to change its condition in small steps. By inserting the notion of parasite into the baroque, we can talk about current concerns about excess, understood as the production of profit and wealth but also waste, and how these are distributed, creating artificial scarcity.
– Cristóbal Gracia
