Nacho Alfonso: Memorials
Alfonso’s memories include personal recollections as well as collective political memory: he stitches the two together seamlessly. Masked Zapatista guerrillas are the subject of three of the works in this exhibition, all monoprints created at the Taller Mexicano de Grabado while on this visit to Chicago (Alfonso’s first to the United States). Yet the series also recalls the time the artist spent with indigenous tribes in Chiapas.
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Alfonso is not only Mexican but a Zapatista supporter, so for him nationality and politics are inseparable. On January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, an armed group calling itself the Zapatista National Liberation Army took over the city of San Cristobal de las Casas in the southern state of Chiapas, a rebellion that became an inspiration to all people on the left wherever they might live. The performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, in an essay on the Zapatistas’ subcommandante Marcos, had this to say about the effect of the rebellion and its extraordinary spokesman: “In the confusing era of ‘the end of ideology’, his utopian political visions presented in a simple, non-ideological and poetical language went straight to the jaded hearts and minds of students, activists, intellectuals, artists, nihilistic teens and even apolitical middle-class professionals. In an era of ferocious neo-nationalism, he made sure to avoid nationalist jargon and dogmas.” What is striking about the Zapatista revolution is the way it fuses the two worlds: the world of modernity and the world of the indigenous tribe. The Zapatista army is made up mostly of indigenous men, women, and children, yet it makes use of the most sophisticated technological media: the Internet, faxes. This opposition of the modern city and the indigenous tribe could be said to be the Mexican condition, and overcoming this duality is central to Nacho Alfonso’s art.
Alfonso seeks to combine not only the past and present but the visual and the auditory, the static and moving image, the spontaneous and the planned. Whenever man-made structures appear in his work–for example, the quays, tower, and boats in El puerto de la Habana (“Port of Havana”)–they seem to blend organically with the sky, the sea, and the coastline. Similarly, where human figures are the subject, as in Mujeres de Guatemala (“Women of Guatemala”), they are indistinguishable from the land: human beings and their works are as much a part of nature as an ocean or a tree. Alfonso achieves this unity by insisting that any supposed opposition between the abstract and the figurative is false: the original subject somehow maintains its integrity, however transformed it might be. But in the series of Zapatista monoprints, the masked guerrillas are more naturalistically rendered. In Neo-Zapatista y su caballo (“Neo-Zapatista and His Horse”), the soldier and his horse dominate the foreground, but Alfonso’s technique makes the figures and mountains alike transparent, as if they were melting into each other.
