David Alfaro Siqueiros and
Álvaro Verduzco
May 8–August 10, 2014
Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros
Tres Picos 29, Colonia Polanco
México City
The Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (SAPS) sets forward an investigation based on the fundamental composition aspects regarding David Alfaro Siqueiros’s mural painting, inciting a reflection that accentuates the modernist will of the artist revealed in his employment of new technologies for pictorial representation, while exhibiting the dynamic formal dispositions that characterize his work, now activated by an unusual contemporary correspondence with Álvaro Verduzco’s facade project.
David Alfaro Siqueiros
Mecanización: Arte y tecnología en la producción de Siqueiros
(Mechanization: Art and Technology in Siqueiros’s Production)
Of all the artists of his generation, David Alfaro Siqueiros was the one to promote the use of new technologies and industrial materials for artistic production. For him, this was an imperative for creating authentic modern art. In his words: “without modern technology, modern art can not be.”
Daniel Garza Usabiaga (guest curator), reviews Siqueiros’s archives and body of work focusing on one crucial element of his creative process: technology. From the implementation of new methods as a definite component of the artist’s modernist character, up to his representation of iconic topics in his work.
The curatorial proposal acknowledges Siqueiros as the lead artist of the 20th century in Mexico, whose plastic production attended the transformations and perceptual changes derived by certain new technologies and other mechanical modern means.
Garza Usabiaga articulates the different arrays through which technology is represented, from perspectives such as Socialist formulations; modernization processes that would determine the 20th century; utopic views related with the human body; or as affirmative representations regarding power and its diverse manifestation; and by taking part in the appraisal of the new, employing the latest innovational technologies.
Mecanización: Arte y tecnología en la producción de Siqueiros (Mechanization: Art and Technology in Siqueiros’s Production) aims to show this dialogical relation: art and technology in the production techniques, and art and technology in the fields of representation, revealing David Alfaro Siqueiros as the first Mexican artist who resorted to technological tools such as the photographic and cinematographic cameras to create spatial compositions that would ensure mural painting as a decisive complement of architecture.
Álvaro Verduzco
Metal y Guadaña (Asociaciones libres en torno a la obra de David Alfaro Siqueiros)
(Metal and Scythe [Free Associations about the Work of David Alfaro Siqueiros])
By means of an unusual association between the epic narrative which characterized Mexican muralism, and the one that would define developed by heavy metal bands in the late sixties, Álvaro Verduzco transfers the iconography of Socialist Realism to the “metalera” aesthetics resorting to the imagery of diverse subcultures in a free and unbounded fashion.
In her curatorial project, Tatiana Cuevas (guest curator) presents the displacement of classic images of the vigorous legacy of Siqueiros, as well as his recognized spatial compositions; materialized in Verduzco’s project using different surfaces: the facade of the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (SAPS), a series of twelve postcards, and one animation (made in collaboration with the sound artist Rogelio Sosa). With this proposal, Verduzco challenges the dogmatist displacement of purely formal elements comprising Siqueiros beliefs—in favor of the clarity and efficiency of their social message—while enticing an unusual correspondence amongst two so distant manifestations.
About Proyecto Siqueiros
Proyecto Siqueiros—created by the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (SAPS) in Mexico City, and La Tallera in Cuernavaca, Morelos—is a platform for critical confrontation and understanding of national and international contemporary art; aiming as well to preserve and entice the extended understanding of the artworks sheltered within both venues. Launched in 2010, the project seeks to articulate reflective proposals concerning theoretical and artistic conceptions of Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, mainly related with the social and political commitments of art, its public character, as well as with his constant experimental search of new means and languages.
Parallel activities
The workshop “Tres minutos” (Three Minutes) (imparted by Ricardo Caballero), parts from Siqueiros’s experience as a prisoner in Lecumberri (1960)—the former jail of the Mexico City—and seeks to create conscience about the conditions of imprisonment by working with actual prisioners, attending to their formal resolutions as individuals and actors, and the subversive the exchangeable social roles that can take place.
The workshop “Paisajes urbanos y fotografía de arquitectura” (Urban lansdscapes and Architecture Photography) (guided by Onnis Luque) attends urban landscape and architecture photography as a means to relate the early photographic use that Siqueiros employed to record his work, inviting participants to execute a photographic rendering of the architecture of our museums: SAPS + La Tallera.
The workshop “Cómo se pinta un mural” (How to paint a mural) (by artist Álvaro Verduzco) recaptures a classic book of muralist Siqueiros to question the dynamics between ideological discourse and aesthetics proposals.
