Julio García Aguilar

Deli Gallery presents the solo show Freedom Anxiety by Julio García Aguilar.

The land itself ceased at the country road. Outside was the common domain of all gods—the roads and streets. Then inside other fences were the particular domains of other gods. A myriad of laws governed all these things and determined conduct; yet he did not know the speech of the gods, nor was there any way for him to learn save by experience.
— Jack London, White Fang

The horrors and joys of this world seem to be mediated by the algorithms and architecture that we constantly nourish. The edges of these apparatuses are transcendent in how they push us to the brink of death while our outwardly inert bodies draw breaths, vehemently gazing into the screen along the landscape of daily life. Here, in this earthly world, we question our reality and we try to imagine other ones.

Our reality, however, has a pervasive quality to it. It allows us the fact that hope exists in this world, and how it could become more than what it is, yet it also enforces the fact that this is the only world there is. It feels like we’ve been inadvertently captured by the Foucaultian dispositif, the same that for Agamben “may produce the impression that in our time, the category of subjectivity is wavering and losing its consistency.”*1 The apparatus is relentless and we have an insatiable appetite for consuming images and adding excess to everything we know.

Here lies the social realism that Julio García Aguilar aims to capture in his work: where the only way beyond is not up and away, but in and onto—embodied.

Feelings of being trapped, displaced, powerless and assimilating to systemically conditioned environments show the contradictory “docile, yet free”*2 body. A body that is malleable, contorted, and manipulated as if it were compulsory to take the form of a Coke bottle. Aguilar points at the obstacles thrown in our path and given to us, he shows us a kind of rhetorical mirror that is almost a cruel pun—one can’t be too sure. As a great painter once said, “a mirror is perhaps as close as you can get to the idea of something being something else, yet different.”*3

Julio García Aguilar (b. 1993, Ejutla, Oaxaca) is a self-taught artist based in Mexico City. He is a founding member of YOPE ps, a project space focused on local and foreign artists in Oaxaca, Mexico. His works have been shown at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (Mexico City), Le Dernier Cri (FR), bbq LA (USA), LADRÓN Galería (Mexico City), and SIEMBRA at Kurimanzutto.

— Deli Gallery

1: Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, p. 15

2: Ibid, p. 19

3: Lee Lozano quote in epigraph of Pun Value: Four works by Lee Lozano, epigraph