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Bodies.
Bodies in ceaseless recreation, fantastical iterations—bodies and bodily forms, altered bodies, beautiful bodies—bodies until repetition makes them sound empty.
Bodies of work, work-bodies, bodies of engineers, collective bodies, bodies.
Adolfo Riestra committed to a bold repetition to dismantle a tradition and enable the emergence of an abnormal one.
His drawings teem with outlawed bodies; they form a revolutionary somateca—both for his time, the 80s, and ours—by demanding a disidentification. These beings refuse the construction of a stable ego, resist identity labels, and flee fixation through contradiction: they are immobile inks chasing the lightness and mutability of the wind.
This somateca is filled with monstrous and beautiful inventions: arms stretching to deformity, twisted torsos, swollen thighs, enlarged genitals, steroidal breasts, falling, delicate buttocks, hermaphroditic creatures. Everything in his drawings is flawed, abject desire, capricious forms. His drawings don’t oppose beauty; they implant it with new standards: his song is that of a bird few understand.
Gibbon noted that in the quintessential Arabic book, the Quran, there are no camels; he argued that if there were any doubts about the Quran’s authenticity, the absence of camels would prove its Arab origin. It was written by Muhammad, and as an Arab, Muhammad didn’t need to know camels were distinctly Arab.
The same can’t be said of Adolfo’s work. Adolfo had to invent in each drawing what he wished existed in reality; through a symbolic-demiurgic operation, he made each painting lavish consistency on the world and the fact is that to make art is to bring forth the space one wishes to inhabit.
Adolfo shares—alongside many others—the recognition of this political and aesthetic operation. His body of work is a cry in the middle of a crater, a crater that becomes a beach, a pleasure that becomes death, a spiral.
This spiral seeks an iconoclastic and atheistic trajectory. His incessant, delirious, and frenetic production is an attack on "natural reality" and a possibility of crooked existence, fighting for life forms not regulated by patriarchy.
His time was marked by an incomplete trope, or as Paul B. Preciado calls it, a failed revolution: “the anticolonial, antiracist, feminist, and homosexual movements, the revolts of transvestites and trans people, the Black Panthers, Woodstock, and Stonewall gave way to the Reagan and Thatcher era.” In Mexico, this era opened the conservative and neoliberal age of Miguel de la Madrid after the "Mexican miracle."
Culturally, the diverse 80s—a fertile period for genealogical revisions yet to be made—were overshadowed by the concept of “new Mexicanisms.” I won’t attempt a thorough evaluation of this phenomenon here, but I will say neomexicanism can be read as a conservative movement that paradoxically expanded the labels of "Mexican-ness," since many associated with it held dissident aesthetic and sexual positions. In short, neomexicanism re-invented or, better said, updated nationalist identity yearnings: the creation of a transparent product packaged for commercialization and export. Nationality became a commodity, the great modernizing shift. Riestra opposes this with dis-identity. Glissant’s defense of the “right to opacity” aligns with this disidentification idea. Riestra’s works demand, doubly, an understanding of divergent beings through an “understandable” language, while protecting and respecting the antinomic desires of those still unreadable or opaque to the canon, tradition, and power.
Unlike the earlier statement about the Quran and the absence of camels, neomexicanism is baroquely saturated with red watermelons, flags, and Virgins of Guadalupe, charros and horses, cacti, and milagritos. Recall the images of Julio Galán, Nahúm Zenil, Eloy Tarcisio, among others. This is not the case with Adolfo Riestra. He paints combs, light bulbs, dogs and cats, bodies I've mentioned, flowers and condoms, athletes, beaches, and many abstractions. There is no neomexicanism in his work, and perhaps it’s worth the effort to begin disassociating him from it to expand the context of his work's reception; to break the membrane enclosing him and let his work overflow, as he overflowed with life.
But how to attempt an escape from categorizations? How to understand through other discursive possibilities? It’s not just the neomexican that encumbers his work but everything that norms reality. It’s no coincidence he appeals to diverse tongues, various languages, ambivalent possibilities. At some indeterminate moment, he invented the neologism “chífora” to refer to and challenge one of his obsessions: rigidity.
With his invention of “chífora,” the devil’s tongues cascade, everything that denies the strict and stiff. Positively, docile and plastic bodies populate his imagination; the trunks of his beings have the flexibility of bamboo, refusing the rigidity of oaks. Chífora is (and is not, because it escapes fixed classifications) Heraclitus’s river, the book of mutations, everything that moves and is about to begin.
Among the possible chífora forms appear a bat fertilizing, a tree branch bifurcating, a penis greeting the sun, a snake coiling under a stone, a deer’s antlers, the invisible winds of a planet.
Chífora tongues, neologisms, transmutations, magmatic forms.
The very forms he approached art with—especially graphic and pictorial disciplines—abound in the chiforic desire for mutation. Whenever Adolfo mastered a pictorial style, he abandoned it, rejecting its mastery, as the controllable and predictable ceased to offer him a spectrum of possibilities, as if his desire was satisfied. He painted (well) in academic style, Cubist (poorly), realvisceralist (abnormal), did costumbrista drawing, impressionist, traversing multiple styles and -isms. He didn’t want to remain in any, nor did he seek to “invent” a personal style, faithful to that ego that refused identity. That’s why his drawings are as much his as they are of his plural others.
This modest effort to exhibit his Body of Work is declared partial. No exhaustive or definitive review was attempted. These signs are offered separately, like a game that allows for the reassembly of another body, the reinvention of another form and another and another. This exhibition is a remembrance.
Mauricio Marcin