Artist: Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba
Exhibition title: Three slight considerations about money, art and nation
Venue: Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico City
Date: December 8, 2016 – January 18, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Parallel Oaxaca
(LIQUIDITY)
From the South Korean wink of the twelfth and
seventh letter of the Latin alphabet,
from the mermaid that seeds social responsibility with a tail
while it traffics with the other the brown from coffee,
from the private song of the proprietor birds,
as they surf the aquifers,
from the headache
and cirrhosis at the OXXO,
from the American Eagle that rests its shadow on the shot chests
of the gore proletariat.
5 liquidities surrounded by nopales and magnetic thorns,
taking the fall
—like a leech that finds a stalactite of blood in a waterfall—
hooked to a volatile plaster testicle of State
—administrator of interdimensional monetary funds—
that distributes nuggets of testosterone from the ceiling,
powder moisture,
for developing economies
dependent on a curvilinear time space
relative orientation of a kind of Mexican
—contemporary to all exchange rates—
who looks at an eagle and knows he has to live his life,
who looks at a snake and knows that without a heart, he would only be a machine,
who looks at a peso and knows that it does not weigh yet he still weighs it
(VOLATILITY)
If Newton was right,
the nopales and spines
should fall freely
over the poliangular perspective of a printed mural
with a national credit card that circulates and floats
free to choose every vanishing point
on the pores of the horrible face of Milton Friedman,
its black vanishing points that point,
drawing on the horizon a new economic liberalism,
a post-national Mexican folklore:
a can of milk Nido that sets the Sun
in the magic town of Pedro Páramo and James Bond
4 lips printed by Grijalbo far more than 30 years ago,
4 lips:
two on Friedman and two on his wife Rose
—that rest mannish in the peanut nape of the economist—
those 4 lips
—deregulated rose of the winds—
blow the fifth stage of muralism
oscillating to the compass of their pulmonary inflation
connected to an oxygen machine in the Swiss Alps
to prolong the Grand Theft Auto effect
of the most vernacular architecture which is money
(PRICEPT)
that same transnational air
from the Chicago Boys’ private snout
vaporizes
plastic integrations
that disintegrates, for example,
the Étant donnés anticipated by Frida Kahlo and
the outdated Nude descending a ladder by Diego Rivera,
bodies as such that do not tear the clouds
though they inflate their veins with helium,
Banco de México is a heavy flow
that crosses and borders the heart,
as the lacqer of ASPIRIN PROTECT®
that bathes the easel paintings of Kahlo and Rivera
as a cardiac arrhythmia, sweat and feel
administering the expression of weight
—in pesos— of its own image,
A I [and here (in the bracket of the parenthesis that airs an image) price is not a concept, it is sensible experience, intelligible and concrete, a percept] R
providing HD resolution to the legal frame of an image,
—and not to the framed image—
in regards to the weakness of attraction of its pixels towards the Earth
and the visual impairment of the real subsumption
of the gravitational exchange value of its photons.
Translation: Bernardo Núñez Magdaleno
***
The exhibition by Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba at Parallel Oaxaca in Mexico City shows three artistic proposals on money, the reproduction of images of the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo´s Trust and Mexican modern art as a myth of national unification.
The works present in the exhibition articulate a narrative of neoliberalism in Mexico as a sensitive project. Merging two notions that emerged in the 1970s, on the one hand the main demand of neoliberal economy, the state´s “deregulation” of markets, and on the other, the awareness of “dematerialization of art” in conceptual and minimalist practices. The exhibition of Aguilar Ruvalcaba “Three slight considerations about money, art and nation” reflects on the material impacts of neoliberal dematerialization of art, money and the nation-state.
Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba (León, 1988). Pataphysic. He currently lives and works in Mexico City. He studied in the educational program SOMA and is founder and active member of Biquini Wax EPS. He has written and collaborated with magazines such as La Tempestad, Horizontal, El blog de crítica, Arquine, etc. He has exhibited his work in the gallery kurimanzutto, in the Museo Universitario del Chopo, the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros. He participated as a speaker in the XIII edition of SITAC.
