(Una versión en español de este texto está disponible aquí)

Either a Rapture or Existential Risk. Installation view, featuring works by Fi Isidore (left) and Rodrigo Red Sandoval (right)

What’s in a curatorial narrative? What percentage of the audience relies on it for finding their way into art that is sometimes daunting, obscure, or lacks a context? As a curator, these are questions that I inevitably ask myself every time I visit a new exhibition.

There are exhibitions where the text overpromises and put the works in the uncomfortable position of doing more than what the artists intended; there are overtly didactic wall and section texts that make me aware of Susan Sontag’s skepticism towards the interpretation of art; such texts often undermine the possibility of the audience of having their own experience of discovering the work; there are exhibitions where the text is merely accessory, written almost as a social obligation of explaining how the works make sense together, or to leave an authorial trace on the exhibition; there are exhibition texts that seem to (still) take pleasure in this very modernist category of complexity or difficulty, and glorify the work by such means while trying to make us forget of questions of contextual or temporal relevance; these usually accompany paintings and sculptures with some degree of abstraction or heightened expressionism. There’s a small category of curatorial texts (and artworks, I may add) that are made to upset us, because of some misplaced privilege of the author, who believes any art gesture is self justified, even today. And then, there are texts that engage in dialogue with the works, offering tools for the audience to experience the exhibition in all its dimensions, while allowing the possibility of building our own interpretative relationship with the works and their curatorial articulation. The possibilities are endless, but these are the very, very common examples.

And then, some people simply can’t be bothered with reading (even less so in 2023), and curators have to contemplate this disheartening possibility and offer enough tools in the exhibition space, narrative and design for the audience to engage with the works in a way that bears some resemblance to the curatorial intention. Ultimately, curating is not simply a practice of consumption; that is, a mere choice of works and artists that are then grouped somehow, both in the text and in the physical space. Instead, it is a practice of interpretation and support of artistic effort that connects the creation process with the spatialization of the work. It is also a creative endeavor that enables a certain openness of the work to an audience, by means of the narrative or conceptual premise that shapes an exhibition, event program, screening, or intervention. In broader terms, curating should be an exercise of generosity, to empower artists’ singularities and affinities by means of a social, conceptual and material assemblage that bleeds outside the exhibition space and timeline. Regardless of the quality of the artworks, it is only in the rare cases the curatorial mission is fully embraced when we get to see a good exhibition.

Installation view, Featuring works by Kristin Reger (left) and Roger Muñoz (right)

Either a Rapture or Existential Risk is one of those cases that keeps me thinking about the relationship between the text, the works, and the installation. Curated by Gaby Cepeda, it is a group show that features the works of five artists in the Mexico City branch of Deli Gallery, spread over the two rooms of the upper level of the gallery. Deli is located in a gorgeous heritage house in the touristy neighborhood of Roma Norte, and since its recent opening during art fair week the past February, it attracts local and international crowds alike. The exhibition presents a total of ten works, most of them by two artists –Rodrigo Red Sandoval and Fi Isidore– who share the room with a view of Puebla street; Kirstin Reger, Roger Muñoz and Horror TV’s works are located in a second room towards the interior of the house. At first glance, all of the works are connected by a delight over impetuous materiality and clean, exquisite finishing, as well as a some vague hedonistic quality impregnated in the surfaces and motifs. Because of this, it is easy to circulate quickly around the smooth and shiny surfaces, but an interpretative exercise is an effort to go against fast, desensitized consumption.

One of the rooms is occupied by four pieces by Rodrigo Red Sandoval and three by Fi Isidore. While the press release declares that the works “are not obviously familiar with one another”, there is a strange closeness between Red Sandoval and Isidore’s works, a shared predilection for blending or juxtaposing the rough and the delicate, the industrial form and the hand crafted, the evocative and the bluntly material. Because of this, the room’s work is ambiguous in its shared authorship, and the decision of putting them together might be explained by the fact that these two artists are the only ones with multiple works in the exhibition; any singular work by a different author placed in their vicinity might have been easily absorbed.

1. Rodrigo Red Sandoval, Guiding Grins, gestures without bodies (Detail). 2. FI Isidore, Drawing, study for a woman’s theatrical costume of Victorian style. Installation view at Deli Gallery.

Red Sandoval’s Guiding Grins, gestures without bodies (2023) is an installation of four sculptural pieces attached to the walls and ceiling of the gallery space. Each of them seems to rehearse a different smile –or grin– from the Cheshire Cat, a popular character in Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but also in previous English literature. Contrary to the dematerialized gesture of the smile emerging, from the darkness, the “smiles” in Red Sandoval’s work are crystalized in pastel fresco, metal and plaster. The evocation of the grin persists in this work, as a permanent gesture with a hefty support. Fi Isidore’s sculptures, such as Drawing, study for a woman’s theatrical costume of Victorian style (2023), are nurtured by an homologous visual culture, thrifting on personal memories and historical artifacts. Her works are sculptures as much as drawings, furniture, sewing patterns, models, and blueprints. Each of the works evokes a desire to encompass a body (whose body?) and a space (which space?) simultaneously, like a model or a design for a future presence. These questions come to me, as the materials are so pure and their connections are so immaculate, that I am dazed from looking for a presence. Do I go back to the text? is this impeccability a means for a connection with the mystical? Are Isidore’s pieces illustrative of the curator’s claim that we as humans desire to know and control everything? Does the ubiquitous presence of Red Sandoval’s grin represent a similar effort? I’ll pause for now and move into the next room.

The other half of the exhibition features three works of Roger Muñoz, Kristin Reger, and Horror TV (a collaboration between Muñoz’s alter ego, Lic. Sniffany, and Minni, a kindred character also known in the local sphere for their practice of snarky criticism in social media). Reger’s work, Horror Vacui (La Oquedad / The Hollowness, 2023) dominates the view upon entrance to this second room. The work consists of two ceramic and platinum sculptural masses carried by a metal and fiberglass base from which two branch-like structures emerge to support the ceramic bodies. A glimpse on the artist’s Instagram account confirms a speculation on the creation process, where digital modeling is used for consolidating the artist’s vision. The result is simultaneously coarse and soft, highly material and strangely ethereal. The hollow body of the ceramic and its reflective platinum finish summon that visual realm that is progressively changing the materiality of our world: liquid architectures that make their way from the screen to museums, institutional buildings and public art projects; everyday utility objects that, to paraphrase William Gibson, seem to be put together in wind tunnels and zero gravity simulators; 3D printed food, DIY guns, sex toys; and even new sporting events mascots and museum memorabilia. The work becomes a floating signifier in which the audience can reflect, both visually and intellectually, and the proces of finding meaning is, in fact, a process of composing one with one’s own repertoire.

Kristin Reger, Horror Vacui (La Oquedad). Installation view at Deli Gallery.

Muñoz is also an artist who has found strength and delight in the expansion of production tools in the digital age. He plays with as many media he can get his hands on: video, sculpture, human hair, digital printing techniques, photography, and papier mache and pours them as delirious pastiches of different faces of pop culture. Sirena Psíquica (Psychic Mermaid, 2021) is precisely the kind of amalgam that showcases the multiplicity of imagery and materials that can be found in Muñoz’s work. Here, the monstrous is not incompatible with glamour, nor is the abject a drive indifferent to desire. Sirena Psíquica made a previous appearance in a show at Ladrón Gallery in Mexico City, two years ago. At Ladron Gallery, Muñoz was presenting a solo exhibition where the mermaid was contextualized with a larger body of work, consisting of five paintings, and a central installation with a sort of tree house with another sculpture inside, an impaled cadaverous head with hair, analogue to Sirena Psíquica. The 2021 exhibition is an indulgent rehearsal of different variations of the pastiche figure of the mermaid that help us understand Muñoz’s references, and to some extent how these compilations of signs and gestures can take many shapes.

1. Roger Muñoz, Sirena Psíquica. 2. Horror TV, La pastilla, fiesta, embei, perico. Installation view at Deli Gallery.

In tandem with this work it is also possible to read La pastilla, fiesta, embiei, perico (The pill, party, MBA, cocaine, 2023), a photography presented on a light box against the window. Here, what are presumably the duo’s characters float upside down on a pool along with red plastic cups and prosthetic breasts, in a scene perspicuously described by the name of the work. The picture is equally lenient: the topic, the stage and the fabrication are playful and have no desire for the pristine finishing that worries the rest of the artists in the exhibition. These last two works both show cynicism and pleasure, and if I were to show a similar mood, I’d probably write that they “remind us of the delusion of the fractured dreams of pop culture, that spasmodically interpellate us on our every screen; that our culture is a corpse of itself, and so on”. But again, I wonder about the text in search for a relationship between the structure of the exhibition and that of the text. And then I find in the text and the exhibition those equally fractured moments between the pristine and the decadent, like a beginning and an end that leave us longing for a middle.

Perhaps there is a larger correspondence between the text and the exhibition than previously suspected. The first part of the text seems to engage with the works by casting a mythical (and perhaps techno-mythical) scenario that is abruptly interrupted, as if violently awoken from a delirium. The text works as a framework (the text as mythology) for longing and idealizing, but calls us out in our ambition. Is it elevating the works, or perhaps uncovering the deception created by their appearance? Moreover, is that radical change in tone and style in the second part a contingency? Or does it mimic the contrast between the hedonistic indulgence of the majority of the works and the disenchantment and whim of the works where Muñoz takes authorship? Is the exhibition a sort of agonistic dialogue between delight and disillusion? What drives the decision of putting several works of some artists and few of others, narrowing the spatial possibilities of the exhibition?

It is possible that this reading places too many questions in decisions that might easily be driven by the economics of space (in the gallery and on paper), as this is, in fact, an exhibition at a commercial gallery with its particular mandate and politics. But it is necessary to respond to the discursive efforts of both artists and curator by attempting a dialogue with their proposal. In the same way curatorial discourse can open or close, divide or reunite, so can the labor of interpretation further complicate the experience of an exhibition. For me, writing these lines is a form of making-sense, to throw questions at the work that don’t emerge in the tight silence of the gallery. Perhaps not much elsewhere, and I want to do it because I miss it. I leave with a curiosity over the curatorial processes, the conversations, and the collective decision making, and I’ll continue to rehearse and develop these questions in future writings about future exhibitions.

—David Ayala-Alfonso
Aug 21, 2023

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Either a Rapture or Existential Risk
curated by Gaby Cepeda
July 22 – August 19, 2023
Deli Gallery, Mexico City
https://deligallery.com/Gaby-Cepeda
Press release/text is available here

All images are my own.

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Either a Rapture or Existential Risk @ Deli Gallery by David Ayala-Alfonso is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

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