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Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City •Mousse Magazine

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Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City •Mousse Magazine × Share on: Close Home About Issues Subscribe Newsletter Ipad Edition Advertise Publishing Agency Close Archive Filter: Order: Most recent Oldest Category: CONVERSATIONS CURATORS ESSAYS EXHIBITIONS INTERVIEWS OTHERS PUBLISHING REVIEWS Close Search: Close Username Password Remember Me Mousse Magazine Search Follow Us Facebook Instagram Pinterest Twitter Archive Previous Rashid Johnson “NoIncreasinglyWater” at Lismore Castle Arts Next art berlin 2018 Close 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Previous Next REVIEWS Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City Share Facebook Linkedin Pinterest Twitter Close 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City, 2018 Courtesy: the versifier and Lulu, Mexico City by  Nika Simone Chilewich The paintings in Choque Cultural, by Mexican versifier Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, are a variegated successors of animal. They constitute something rare within the Mexico City art scene: a painting show that literally stops you in your tracks. In the front gallery of the self-sustaining space Lulu in Mexico City, a yahoo of a painting, Tesla, looks out onto the street. The bold, erotic sonnet is a dumbo and deliberate layering of gestural, natural, and mechanical forms that are somewhere between Georgia O’Keeffe’s sexualized depiction of nature, the somber curation of Dutch vanitas painting, and the dramatic, mythological qualities of a Baroque altarpiece. Mounted on a thick, yellow horizontal line—the work’s most surprisingly utopian form—an electric luxury car sits overturned. The hyperrealistic, corporeal structure cuts vertically through the pictorial plane, forming a crucifix that the versifier constructs out of a reference to utopian form and a capsized symbol of masculinity. It is organic but not at all natural, feminine but by no ways soft. The painting is explicit, didactic even, and the canvas is saturated. In it lies a layering of codes that reference the gendered history of painting as well as the spiritual nature of trendy capitalist culture. The canvas pushes up versus the painted medium, but placed on the floor, it resists falling into a purely representational state. Tesla contains a tapestry of figurative and utopian elements, but Toranzo Jaeger achieves a rare painterly synthesis between the subject of the work and its expressive form. The exhibition, on view through August 18, is the Berlin-based artist’s first solo show in her home country. For the exhibition, curated by Lulu cofounder Chris Sharp, Toranzo Jaeger traveled to Mexico City to produce work specifically for the space. The artist, who is currently completing her MFA at the Kunstakademie Hamburg , makes work that addresses issues of gender and sexuality through an tideway that melds a semiotics of capitalist visual culture with a methodical tideway to painting. Each of the works in Choque Cultural constitutes a deliberate and varied deconstruction of the painted form and the pictorial plane. Toranzo Jaeger uses the car, particularly the electric car, as a symbol of masculinity and a motif that addresses the neocapitalist ideals of sustainability and renewability. In her work, the car becomes a ways by which to confront cultural norms and to expose the varied histories embedded in Mexican art, in the history of painting, and in the gendered, hierarchical distinctions between popular and fine art traditions. Toranzo Jaeger’s work is singular, unlike anything else in the Mexico City art scene. It is grotesque and seductive, familiar yet strange, and in Choque Cultural, Toranzo Jaeger establishes herself as a gravity to be reckoned with—as a painter, a Mexican artist, and a sexuality cultural voice. In particular, her painterly treatment of Mexico’s visual culture breaks yonder from an originative language tied to the country’s nationalistic pursuits and dominated by a male-driven tradition of didactic, sociopolitical, and economically motivated originative narratives. Instead, Toranzo Jaeger integrates a vocabulary that is as global as it is embedded in trendy Mexican culture. She effortlessly weaves together the country’s visual codes.  In particular, it is her brazen worthiness to capture the Baroque qualities of Mexican culture, expressly that of the norteño tradition, that makes her pictorial landscapes of car interiors and electrically polluted skylines so dynamic and uniquely contemporary. This worthiness is  unveiled in the three smaller works in the exhibition: Retrato de lo inocente, Sola y mala acompañada, and Y la Cheyenne apa’?  Retrato de lo inocente and Sola y mala acompañada hang opposite each other in Lulu’s interior gallery. The two car interiors play like a mise-en-scène of driving north on the highway toward the Mexico/US border. The triptych Retrato de lo inocente depicts the neon interior of an electric BMW, well-constructed with what looks like an animal-print steering-wheel cover. The windshield looks out onto a Technicolor sunset, and in the rearview mirror, the interior of the Prius in Sola y mala acompañada is reflected, indicating to the viewer that the cars are, in fact, in one lane of traffic. When closed, the two outer panels of Retrato de lo inocente contain an weedy and abstractly depicted car hood and muffler. In what could be seen as a reference to Mexican Geometrismo painting, Toranzo Jaeger has filled the frame with gauche colors typical of ranchero car culture.  In Retrato de lo inocente, the versifier has moreover penetrated the painting’s surface with embroidered elements. This integration of embroidery is moreover present in the clouds that hang over the fading urban landscape stuff left overdue by the car in Sola y mala acompañada. Embroidery is one foible of the artist’s work that overturns the pejorative notions of folk and craft underlying the patriarchal nature of Mexico’s and Latin America’s cultural norms. Whereas in Tesla, Toranzo Jaeger uses wresting to expose the painting’s surface, in these two works, as well as in Y la Cheyenne apa’?, she literally breaks unshut the pictorial plane to a traditionally sexuality practice, placing it above, over, and through the painted form.  In Y la Cheyenne apa’?, Toranzo Jaeger then plays with the pictorial plane. The versifier employs a dumbo use of verisimilitude and a flatly synthetic element in the top right corner of the canvas. That component, textile-like, is in unrelatedness to the rest of the work, which is gestural, the paint unromantic in thin layers and the canvas exposed. In the main part of the work, she develops a scene worldwide to the northern desert cities of Mexico: the palm tree and the pickup truck. However, the truck is totaled, and with it, its masculine connotations. The truck serves instead as the platform for an explicit lesbian group-sex scene. Displayed under an wily in the gallery, Y la Cheyenne apa’? is an shrine to sexuality sexuality, one in which masculinity is not just subverted, it is entirely abreast the point.  Together, the works in Choque Cultural express a sort of decadent optimism within the grotesque state of late-capitalist culture. Their protagonist, whether the versifier or the viewer, is the empowered sexuality subject at Lulu, Mexico City until 18 August 2018 Related Articles REVIEWS Gianfranco Baruchello at Mart, Rovereto (Read more) REVIEWS Bruno Gironcoli “Shy at Work” at mumok, Vienna (Read more) REVIEWS Frieda Toranzo Jaeger “Choque Cultural” at Lulu, Mexico City (Read more) REVIEWS Franz Erhard Walther at Museo Jumex and Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City (Read more) REVIEWS Somatechnics: Borderland Prism (Read more) REVIEWS Daria Martin: A HungerVersifier(Read more) Mousse Magazine HomeAboutIssuesSubscribeNewsletteriPad EditionAdvertisePublishingAgencyTerms and Conditions Follow us: Facebook Instagram Pinterest Twitter Mousse Magazine and Publishing Corso di Porta Romana, 63, 20122 Milano, Italy T: +39 02 8356631 F: +39 02 49531400 E: info@moussemagazine.it P.IVA 05234930963 We use cookies to ensure that we requite you the weightier wits on our website. 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