Mauricio Limón de León

The Cabañas Museum presents Blind Memory by Mauricio Limón de León.

“The question of Europe is a global question…we may have a common history but that does not mean that we have a shared memory.” Achille Mbembe. Memory and Restitution.

“She laughs to germinate and for the morning to germinate. Laughing is a way of being born. If I could laugh like her without knowing why…” Octavio Paz, Laughter and penance.

Satire is effective as long as it generates a space, a complex psychic and bodily moment in which reflection and laughter become the same phenomenon, a single outburst that is instinctive, cathartic and representative of the human condition. Laughter defines us and separates us from the rest of the species, tragedy and exaltation of the intellect... although the hyena is now wallowing in laughter. What are you laughing at? Question, fundamental doubt, cornerstone of interaction.

The present exhibition by Mauricio Limón de León (Mexico City, 1979) brings together a heterogeneous body of works around the aesthetic and discursive possibilities of satirizing various core areas of contemporary artistic, cognitive, psychic, sociopolitical and humorous development. Through different media such as sculpture, graphics, performance, video and painting, his works challenge a range of paradigms on identity construction, the so-called “white supremacy” and the ethnographic, hegemonic postcolonial theories and loopholes that still prevail to generate criticism and self-criticism of artistic work, collecting, theoretical-curatorial babbling and altruistic cultural institutions like this one where we find ourselves. The first to laugh loses, the last to laugh will laugh better. Laughing, the hyena dies.

Among this set of works, the presence of the mask stands out as an unbeatable and ancient artifact of concealing identities and the grotesque, mythical, profane or sacred. In this regard, Limón de León interweaves various elements from African cultures, Mexican carnivals and the satirical terracotta figures of Honoré Daumier (Célébrités du Juste Milieu) to generate a series of ironic performative actions and question the form that these objects are both displayed as acquired through a global and informal market. The false and the authentic, masked. In addition to this, the exhibition integrates a series of disconcerting and attractive paintings in which various landscapes or hybrid scenarios dialogue with abstract signs that the artist appropriates from the surrealist painter Yves Laloy. One more layer of this intricate staging is made up of a group of works that Limón de León has made in collaboration with the Wixárica artists Josefina Venegas and Ramón Carrillo to extend their research towards the production of objects with artisanal techniques and highlight the transmission of knowledge, materials, and symbols. Pieces that are located in that controversial interstice between the artistic object, the exotic, the ancestral techniques of utilitarian production, and mere commercialization.

In conclusion, the aesthetic and discursive commitment of this artist offers multiple layers of interpretation and stratagems or resources aimed at generating a series of estrangements or critical confusions around art, politics, and culture. Serious matters without a doubt but not free from being satirized. On the contrary, while you can, laugh like the hyena.

― Victor Palacios