8M
Cuerpo de Obra presents an extensive selection of drawings, paintings and sculptures that traces the life and work of Adolfo Riestra (Tepic, Nayarit, 1944 - Mexico City, 1989).
Curated by Mauricio Marcin, the exhibition highlights Riestra's ability to explore the representation of the human body in unusual and disruptive ways, questioning hegemonic norms of beauty and identity. His universe is populated by beings that demand disidentification: arms that elongate to the point of defectiveness, torsos that twist, swollen thighs, exaggerated genitalia, hermaphroditic creatures... These beings avoid the construction of a stable ego and seek lightness and mutability.
Riestra does not oppose beauty, but implants it with other canons: his song is that of a bird that few understand.
Bodies.
Bodies in ceaseless recreation, in fantastical iterations bodies and bodily forms; non-conforming 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.
— Mauricio Marcin
Bodies.
Bodies in ceaseless recreation, in fantastical iterations bodies and bodily forms; non-conforming 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 a lavish consistency to the world and that is that to make art is to create 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 controlled 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 reinvented 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 both; 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 regulates reality. It’s no coincidence he appeals to diverse tongues, various languages, and 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 is 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
Addenda
*** Adolfo died in 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which marked the end of one possible world and the establishment of another, hegemonic and terrible. This moment also concentrated, through the HIV pandemic, one of the forms of bio-identification, registration, control, and exclusion of diversity. There is still much to learn and remember from this.
*** Insurrections without humor are very dull. Laughter has a reformative power executed through a method: it prepares and sets expectations to lead to nothingness. The constant humor in Adolfo's works serves as a reminder: life can be stripped of its explanation. After the joyous laughter, we remain under the guardianship of silence.
1 J.L.B. reflected on the relationship between literature and national identity in a memorable 1932 lecture, later published in El escritor y la tradición.
2 Self portrait, Erika L. Sánchez
3 Paul B. Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi, 2022
4 The term "neomexicanismo" is attributed to critic Teresa del Conde, who on April 25, 1987, published the article "Nuevos mexicanismos" in the newspaper unomásuno. In her text, Del Conde does not explicitly use the neologism "neomexicanismos," but rather the equivalent term "nuevos mexicanismos."
5 It is no coincidence that Carlos Salinas, the successor of Miguel de la Madrid, promoted international exhibitions as a diplomatic currency during the years when Mexico was preparing its economic alliance with the United States and Canada. In 1992, the year of the trade agreement proposal, six exhibitions were held in Germany, England, France, the United States, Italy, and Spain, following the model proposed by Fernando Gamboa, which identified "Mexican-ness" as an unbroken continuum from pre-Hispanic times to the modern nation-state. I consider Mexico: Splendors of 30 Centuries the pinnacle of this diplomatic movement. Carla Herrera-Prats extensively studied this phenomenon in Historias Oficiales.
Musculosxs cuerpxs hechos de fragmentos de otrxs, que se transfiguran en tránsfugas de la norma, de la forma y de la horma, suicidas de Jim Jones sacando la lengüita, como la mascota recogida de la calle, mostrando la mazorca, los labios colorados, las pieles oscurecidas, con pelitos, con pelos en los sobacos, con máscaras, mascarillas, sin cubrebocas, se masturban y se acarician, se tocan las puntas de los dedos en mudras leves y equilibristas, se nos asoman los pezones, se me escurren las chichis, la panza se menea mientras hacen deporte, mientras levantan pesas, pesos pesados del paseo, se agacha, vuelve a ser nosotros, ellas, todxs junt@s, y en reversa se agacha para recoger florecillas pal florero, sin enseñar la rayita, muchas rayitas, rayas, rayas, rayas, volutas y curvas que significan ‘nube’, otras de colores que quieren decir ‘arcoiris’. Otras ‘perro’. Otras también.
Me salen brazos de la cabeza -una Kali desconcentrada y distraída- y miro mientras a mis colegas (que como deidades deben mucho a una gestualidad que quiere ser afectiva y afirma cosas que parecerían poco relevantes), con los ojos chispados, y los ojos anegados de lágrimas que se han convertido en manantiales, para la sed de tu perra, tu gata, tu cocodrila, para tu vaso de Tonalá. Páralo. Sostén una manguera, una jarrita, unos lápices, aquella trae un gorro en forma de estrella, te recuerdan a una banda de funk, toda sudada.
Sin aliento, me detengo. Me paro. Me levanto y brindo exangüe, por tu pasado de doble piel, de doble lengua, de doble raya mi cuaderno de contabilidad, con su margen rojo, ingresos y egresos son ahora rostros, retratos, personas, identidades, narices y orejas, cajas torácicas y amigos, otra vez un camarada que ladra, ambientes, situaciones. Respiro, suspiro, y la araña me reta con sus güebotes, y canta con el ano (como en ‘Pink Flamigos’), finges demencia, te volteas y buscas otros horizontes, otras rutas, no hay más, pero huele a óleo, a barro, a jarro, con agua fresquecita, agua de beber.
Otra vez en pedazos recontamos la posibilidad de ensamblarles en nuevas corporeidades, nuevas corporaciones, unas que no fueran globalizadas, ni eficientes, ni productivas, mucho menos reproductivas, pero sí placenteras y gozosas, con faldas, esgrafiadas -¡más rayas!-: brazos, piernas, manos y pies con zapatitos tipo Borceguí. Desperdigados los miembros por todos lados, se agruparían en bola, en bolas, para llamarse ‘esculturas’. Les quieren llamar ‘hieráticas’, ‘mexicanas’, pero en su rebeldía innata, se les sale del alma lo humano del cántaro, de su pastillaje chiforífico, que lo hermana con el ejército chino, y levanta su chingado grito, enarbolando como bandera unos jeans de cerámica, mientras abraza a su hermana la bombonera.
Tapándose la cara, ante cuatro mazacuatas, la calaca se hace afuera de la bacinica, a su alrededor, una mujer y su cabello, se regocijan ante el mar, el cristo encarnado en una bailarina que a su vez se rodea de una guerra, de tripas, de más máscaras, de otra guerra y que gesticula, ve allá un planeta con anillos que son serpientes -¿Serpienturno?-, y blandiendo prostéticamente un buen dildo, otra señora afirma ‘¡Qué hermosa es la natura!’; más allá la muerta muerte aguarda con su cepillito de cerda sintética a los murciélagos -que en francés se llaman chauve souris- y quienes muy entretenidos- hablan de manufactureras. La vampira dice: ‘Uy, el señor está muy gordo’, pero son solamente cuerpos con vello, canes con cacas y payasos montados en toros, ignorando la belicosidad circundante. Ay ay ay. Sangre. Paracaidistas. Un caimán. ‘Trabajar, superarse, ya habrá tiempo para reventarse’, casi ya no alcanzó a escuchar…
Las recomendaciones del artista, al pie de la letra, y sin pasarse de la raya, de tú y de Usted, para no discriminar:
‘No te metas los dedos a la boca’
Y:
‘No coma latas
No consuma medicamento
No tome mucho alcohol
No se duerma tarde
baile mucho
Adolfo Riestra 77 ’
Abraham Cruzvillegas
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Adolfo Riestra, ‘Cuerpo de Obra’. Installation views, OMR, Mexico, 2024. Photos: Alejandro Ramirez Orozco. Courtesy of Archivo Adolfo Riestra and OMR.
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