viernes, 12 de marzo de 2010

OPENING SLAVA MOGUTIN'S GROTESQUE REALISM Essay for Slava Mogutin’s Lost Boys. By Octavio Zaya. LA FRESH GALLERY


PABLO LEON DE LA BARRA

OPENING SLAVA MOGUTIN


RAFARL DOCTOR RONCERO
SLAVA Y TOLO

It is almost a given, it seems already inevitable, to misread a foreign artist’s work when he is on his way to the marketplace. When it is not exoticized or essentialized, sugarcoated or sanitized, it is stripped of its background, of its original context, and “Americanized,” connected to such and such domestic trends, and thus “internationalized” or “universalized.” Sometimes the artist needs to drop his name. Sometimes he needs to drop his pants. A Brazilian avant-gardist is construed as a reflection of “preceding” New York currents. A Mexican artist is celebrated while being rendered without any reference to the culture and experience that, to begin with, made his work possible. A South-African master is dispossessed of his local implications, of his historical resources, of his wit, of his critical edge… In many, perhaps most instances, the artist seems to be a willing participant in this kind of transformation; in many cases he is an accomplice.
Octavio Zaya

OPENING ABDUL VAS, LA FRESH GALLERY. ABDUL VAS, CARLOS DIEZ-DIEZ, ZADIE XA, AITOR SARAIBA





TOPACIO Y SUS BABYS

ABDUL VAS, AITOR SARAIBA & TOPACIO FRESH


ABDUL VAS

"Anything goes" Never Mind the Bullocks, Here’s Abdul Vas. By Raul Zamudio


Abdul Vas’ work reminds us with a visual fierceness of how quotidian culture and art can be transformed into a volatile, revolutionary concoction. His conflation of so-called "low brow" entertainment with his distinct, artistic practice has run the gamut from works that reference Australian mega-rock band AC/DC, to the American major league baseball team Cincinnati Reds, as well as the American porn star Sasha Grey, and other characters that often populate society’s margins. The diverse media that Vas deploys, from which his iconography manifests, include large-scale painting, photography, work-on-paper, and installation.

Raul Zamudio