ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS

2023-07-29

2023-10-29

Opening

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locations

WINSING ART PLACE

“Self-construction is about people, communities building, sharing, and communicating together. It's all about getting together, and about getting together with the local community and learning with the locals.” — Abraham Cruz Villigos

In 2015, the Turbine Hall of the Tate Gallery in London exhibited a large installation of 240 wooden planters filled with soil collected from parks and gardens throughout London, and many lampposts built with ready-made materials to illuminate these soils. Empty Lot, by Mexican artist Aya Created by a commission from the Museum of Art, Abraham Cruz Willigos talks about the city and the environment. Growing up in the Cruz Viligos community in southern Mexico, the creative form is deeply influenced by the environment and experiences of childhood growth, which is characterized by the impressionable and changing work that reflects the historical background of Araucco. In the 1960s, Ajusco was settled by a group of squatters, which also included the Cruz Villigos family, economic instability, people's need for housing, and the harsh local volcanic environment, prompting people to build their own homes without a blueprint. These residents built houses in stages, continuing to this day in a progressive, collective and organic “never finished” way. Such a philosophy of life fully embodies the meaning of Autoconstrucción — self-construction.

Since 2007, self-construction has been the core concept of Cruz Viligos's work. For the artist, he is not focused on the building itself, but is attracted by the needs and reasons behind the production of such a form, which is a form of understanding reality and approaching things in a particular economic, political and social context style, and metaphorically the process of constructing self-identity. At the same time, Cruz Villigos shows such a process in the state or type of the work through the use of various non-formal materials.

During his studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Cruz Viligos participated in a Friday workshop with a group of artists organized by Briel Orozco. Through this workshop, they exchanged and consulted, and at this time Cruz Viligos also exhibited his work publicly for the first time. From around 1987, Cruz Viligos began to create with ready-made objects at his parents' home. In 1992, Objeto útil pero bonito, showed the traces of life in objects, he put the stair railings in his home together with his father's paintings, he said: “I didn't do anything, just put them together Stand up. I want to test my ability to make things conversational, not to do any kind of conversion or use any technology. There is no way to interfere with the relationship between them other than adding our own insights and explanations.” In addition to Friday's workshop, many Mexican muralists, such as José Clément Orozco, Adolphe Beste Mogard, Fermín Reveltas, and others, had different levels of influence on Cruz Viligos's painting. The artist's paintings are often full of strong humor and harmony, which is related to his early work as a cartoonist. The Nuestra imagen actual monkey series, which hides social and political issues, reveals his methods of expression. Between 1995 and 1997, Cruz Villigos actively studied craft technology in the Prepecha region of Mexico. He is good at using local materials to design and build, introducing everyday objects into the work, but does not mean transforming one object into another; instead, the meaning of the original objects and sculptures disappears and becomes other metaphorical objects. Spanning sculpture, painting, installation, imagery, and performance, Cruz Viligos's work is closely linked to the geography and culture of Mexico, linked to the sense of belonging and collective spirit defined by the social and historical environment.

This exhibition features a series of sculptural installations and paintings by Cruz Viligos. Sculptures reconstituted and stacked from the collected finished materials reflect the artist's concept of self-construction from the growing environment. The work appears unfinished, reflecting the history and footprint of Mexico's development; the grid-shaped Blind self portrait series, a colorful chronicle of Cruz Viligos's life. Underneath the paint is the pile of his life, and the artist separates these objects from his own experience, highlighting their individual states of life, independence and freedom; Cruz Viligos's research on painting is exhibited at Otras The rutas series and mural “Primantropofilia 5”, a work that ties together widely with art history, politics and history, using a mop as a blueprint and using the mop as a tool to create space for the work with the whole body, exploring the criticality of artistic language. Cruz Viligos's work involves change, incompleteness and unpredictability. In other words, the characteristics of this work have to do with chance, variability and hope at the same time.