A strange parade of male characters inhabits, or bursts into, the paintings of the painter Rocío Caballero (Mexico City, 1964). Most of them wear a pig mask. It can also be elephant, rabbit, duck, bear or raccoon, as seen in the mixed technique. Out of sight… (2023). In that painting everyone covers their eyes while the person dressed as a pig talks on his cell phone. Almost all of his characters dress in suits, even formal ones.
Under the title of The alchemy of powerCaballero exhibits 30 paintings produced between 2022 and 2023 at the Aldama Fine Art gallery. In general, they are mixed techniques, although there are five engravings made in etching and aquatint with two color plates.
Of the pig masks, Caballero says to The Conference: “I have always had a special taste for these beings. In my childhood I lived with some, my mother raised them for important family events. When Arturo Rivera invited me to a group exhibition at the Museum of the Mask (2011) I incorporated this element into my characters for the first time.
“At that moment I discovered the true essence of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Yuppieland. Then I reread the farm rebellion and it all made sense to me. Over the course of 13 years, the pig took center stage in my work because of that George Orwell character. In this dystopian world that I have created, the teachings must be somewhat like fables, and of course, children’s teachings are always given by animals, so in this kingdom the teachings are dystopian.”
Regarding the kingdom of Yuppieland, he expresses that “after 20 years of speaking in images of masculinity, I understood that I had built a great kingdom in which they inhabit. It’s like an alternate world to this one, a timeless place. And the colonies that make it up are the different series that I have developed to tell their story. Yes, I consider myself a visual narrator.
“There are, for example, the series The gray code, Of crime and without punishment, Yuppitos since they were little, The speculators and, the most recent, The parables of Mr. Head. In all of them the story of my kingdom is told.”
In your text The silent book of Rocío Caballerowritten about the exhibition, the art critic Erik Castillo points out that in the artist’s speech “the male figures are beings that metaphorize – in an ambiguous way and in a circular way – our need for personal balance and social plenitude in the face of the existential collapse and before the advent of political catastrophe.”
In addition, The prodigious aristocrats (a term created by the decadent symbolists of the Belle Époque) who inhabit Caballero’s hieroglyphic inventions operate in fantastic spheres that merge the exterior landscape, the architectural interior, and the iconographic spaces cited from other works of art into a mental forum. reminiscent of the alchemists’ laboratory that appears in the arcane vignettes
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During his career, Caballero has supported “a figurative model of visual representation that always appears before the public eye in the manner of a figuration.” vintage. That is to say, the entirety of his painting has never lost its fundamental aspect: it seems produced in the visionary splendor of another cultural era prior to his, that is, in an imaginative aesthetic past where, however, a sophisticated game of retrospections and references, forms and nostalgic environments that propose symbolic stories about the present,” Castillo writes.
The critic determines different types of narratives encrypted within the artist’s figurative discourse. The main one has the structure of hermetic, ancient and modern allegories that transmit mystical reflections or philosophical interpretations of reality. The emergence of Caballero’s artistic proposal coincided with the visibility, in the art scene in Mexico, of the ideas of the cultural phenomenon known as postmodernism, a philosophical, cultural and artistic movement that emerged at the end of the 20th century as a reaction to intellectual ideas. and philosophical of modernity.
The exhibition The alchemy of powerby Roció Caballero, opens today at the Aldama Fine Art gallery (Palacio de Versalles 100 LB, Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood).