AL AMIGO QUE NO ME SALVÓ LA VIDA: PINTURAS MEXICANAS 1976-1991

WITH WORKS BY

Adolfo Riestra
Francisco Toledo
Georgina Quintana
Germán Venegas
Julio Galán
Nahum B. Zenil
Roberto Turnbull

MASA presents a timely revisitation of 1980s Mexican painting, centering robust work – many not previously on view this century – from a selection of artists who were vanguard in their representations of self, hovering between sincerity and provocation in meditations on devotion, melancholy, and bodily function. Rather than a regional variant of postmodernism, “Al Amigo Que No Me Salvó La Vida” considers the effort of memoir in this period of Mexican art as a spiritual and aesthetic challenge in the face of political, tectonic, and existential crises. The exhibition borrows its title from the eponymous novel by Hervé Guibert, a fictionalized account of the 1980s published just before the author’s death in 1991 from AIDS-related complications. As in the book, the exhibition “Al Amigo Que No Me Salvó La Vida” investigates in defiant materiality a tenderness towards the visceral, and the anatomization of observation and sensation that lends itself to both eroticization and revelation.

“Al Amigo Que No Me Salvó La Vida” owes a great debt to the discourse of “Neomexicanismo,” particularly the curators, gallerists, and critics whose precise insights framed this period as containing not only multitudes but contradictions. It is alongside this movement that “Al Amigo Que No Me Salvó La Vida” exists, gathering moments of collapse within shared narratives: between the sacred and profane, the effort and its consequence, and also between everyday desire and rarefied art. In these works epitomizing postmodernist strategies, pastiched depictions of the built environment and vernacular objects float, frottage, and interpenetrate – sometimes physically cutting through the canvas itself – suggesting a mutual reflection between painting and the formation of difference and subculture.

Anticipating several strains of current painting, the works in “Al Amigo Que No Me Salvó La Vida” yet do not strive for representation beyond reproach, but rather revisit an often overlooked avant garde centered in Mexico that was committed to incitement under the guise of confession: a sensibility at once poignant and funny, and just as often doomed. As the era’s leading critic, Teresa del Conde (1938-2017), wrote on the occasion of Germán Venegas’ exhibition “Polvo de Imagenes” at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1992, these are works that “allow us to apprehend with a certain irony the aesthetic sides of very serious things: beliefs, vices, childhood, sexuality, and what awaits towards the end.”

– Su Wu

With special thanks to Proyectos Monclova, Le Laboratoire, Galeria OMR, Galeria de Arte Mexicano, Francisco Berzunza, Archivo Adolfo Riestra, and Collecíon M. Jasso, Madrid.