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