Press Release - Alfredo De Stefano: |
Yet Polidori is something of an exception. Monica Castillo's sharp, smart video "Dancer's Self-Portrait" eschews national politics entirely. Hers is an example of a particularly stateless kind of artwork -- referencing above all this artist's creative forebears, from 1970s body artists to their abstract expressionist antecedents. In the video, a leotard-clad dancer has open paint cans strapped to her waist, wrists and ankles. As she jetes and plies, thick pigment slithers over her body or splashes on the floor. The piece is a comical sendup of Jackson Pollock-style drips and slathers, asserting a feminist take on abstract expressionist machismo. It's particularly refreshing when seen alongside Enrique Jezik's pair of pretentious videos, featuring power tools and heavy machinery, that tap the manly legacy of Pollock and company.
Over at the Cultural Institute of Mexico, an expansive suite of first- and fourth-floor galleries play host to a mix of painting and sculpture. There's too much to mention here, though I will call out some of my favorites: Alfredo de Stefano's lightbox-mounted transparency "Firefly," a gorgeous image of switched-on flashlights scattered across a cracked desert landscape that reads as an elegy to illegal immigrants; Fabian Ugalde's comic-book inspired paintings making light of contemporary art stars.
A predominantly retrograde cache of paintings and drawings hangs at Meridian International Center. Opening with Alberto Castro Leñero's tripartite neo-abstract expressionist canvas and continuing with Magali Lara's big, Cy Twombly-style oils and Boris Viskin's box constructions, the selection here seems hamstrung by its debt to mid-20th-century innovators. Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Ryman, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein are all conjured. The predictable and anachronistic work that results is particularly forgettable.
Whatever the successes and failures of individual works, "Mexican Report" makes clear that its country's artists have joined the ranks of international contemporary artists defined more by profession than birthplace. Still, the impetus to assert individuality remains. Negotiating the two is no easy task.