Dreams of Painting Produce Monsters
Circe Irasema. A solo exhibition presented by Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros
Plots for a Mural is a large format piece produced by Circe Irasema that relates to her series cosmic painting –works that revisit examples of modern art using make-up tablets. This work, which occupies a central place in the exhibition, dialogues with the preliminary sketch executed by David Alfaro Siqueiros for Life and Work of Generalissimo Don Ignacio de Allende, a mural that he painted and completed in 1951 in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato. In the artist’s proposal, a series of subversions of different aspects that defined the historical enterprise of muralism operate. One of these corresponds to the difference in materials that, in addition to giving rise to different associations, is linked to issues of durability of the work of art. In contrast to modern murals, made with the fresco technique or through industrial paintings, the use of make-up does not aspire to an eternal permanence of pictorial materiality –to a kind of immortality.
The use of make-up as a pictorial material, as well as its allusions and references, in this dialogue with Siqueiros’s work, subverts the predominant heteropatriarchal logic within the generalized perception of heroic muralism and its cult of male figures such as the worker artist or the revolutionary artist, placing it in a kind of drag. The Siquerian term plastic box, for example, is reconfigured as a small manipulable, dynamic, transformable make-up box that keeps, inside, multiple planes and folds that can be unfolded –considerations that resonate with the interests of the muralist. This new solution also presents a change of scale and establishes a unique proximity and interaction with the spectators that a mural will never have. Miniaturization, as well as the relationship of the work of art with its reconfiguration in boxes or briefcases, are aspects present in these works that allude to previous projects or pieces by the artist.
The hand occupies a leading place in this project and also fits into the mystique of muralism as an agent of creation or change. Circe Irasema has selected photographs from Siqueiros’ archive where there is a record of his hand during his activity as a painter, like stains that register his fingerprints. The artist has intervened several wooden hands to which she has attached acrylic nails and has painted them following patterns from different murals. The object contrasts cosmetic painting with mural painting while recalling the representation of long nails as a sign of effeminacy by different muralists –as Diego Rivera did in the works he executed in the building of the Ministry of Public Education.
Dreams of Painting Produce Monsters refers to the production of these exclusionary narratives that the muralist enterprise engendered once it fell into the realm of the mythical and that left very little room for all those people who did not conform to its parameters –which, it is worth adding, were perpetuated around much of the artistic production that took place in Mexico during the twentieth century. The monster, always potentially present and always threatening, seems to underlie a series of pieces where a hand seeks to emerge from the canvases and walls, as if it were a sinister scene in a film.
Daniel Garza Usabiaga, curator.
