ENRIQUE CHAGOYA
THE ENLIGHTENED SAVAGE: NEW PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, PRINTS AND CANNED FOOD
MARCH 1 - APRIL 6
During March the George Adams Gallery will show new work by Enrique Chagoya. The exhibition, the artist’s second at the gallery, will include 6 canvasses, a new amate paper “codex,” a suite of etchings based on Goya’s “Capricios,” and a multiple consisting of canned “soups,” after which the exhibition is titled.
Enrique Chagoya is a native of Mexico who teaches in the Fine Arts department of Stanford University. In his work of the past six years, Chagoya has combined images borrowed from a wide variety of sources such as the Meso-Americans, contemporary North Americans, and European art history, to question the validity of cultural identity. Who, for example, is the “real” American, the INS agent or the Mexican prevented from entering the country by the Border Patrol? Indeed, is there such as thing as a “real” American, or Mexican, or European, or Asian, or African?
Included in the current exhibition are several such works. For example, in “Undercover man,” 2002, Chagoya depicts several figures - African tribesmen, Afghanis, Aborigines from Australia and a European female - posed in front of an office marked Border Patrol. Each figure appears to be a member of a “tribe,” yet the title suggests that one is a secret agent in disguise. We don’t know who the pretender is, a situation that Chagoya seems to find not a little comical.
In “Cartography,” 2002, Chagoya borrows the form and imagery of the Nahua Codex Testeriano, which was written in the mid-1500s and was intended to serve as a catechism to help convert the Meso-Americans (Aztecs, Toltecs, etc) to Christianity. For Chagoya, this early codex represents an ironic blurring of the boundaries between two distinct cultures because the story of Christ is told in the format traditionally used to depict the life of Nahuatl kings. Chagoya further compounds the irony by selectively replacing images from the original codex with contemporary images of his own such as a figure in a turban, an oil well, Batman, and a SUV.
Other works in the exhibition include “The World Backwards,” 2002, which juxtaposes a “Cannibull’s Soup” can with a series of engravings showing scenes of life in which roles are reversed (a man flies while a birds walks, a burrows strolls while a man carries the load, etc.), and “Der Abenteuer der Kannibalen Bioethicist” (The Adventures of the Cannibal Bio-Ethicist), 2000, a mixed-media print in codex form that gently pokes fun at scientific posturing. There is also a multiple of ten “Cannibull’s Soups,” titled “The Enlightened Savage,” 2002, which includes “Artist’s Brains,” “Cream of Dealer” and “Critics Tongue.”
