Since its founding, the Rufino Tamayo Biennial has been a crucial device for tracking the evolution of painting in Mexico. More than a competition, it has functioned as a structure through which to read the tensions, drifts, and continuities of a medium that, far from being exhausted, continues to find new ways to breathe. Its origin responded to the need to defend painting at a historical moment when other languages were beginning to displace it—or at least to place it under suspicion. Today, in an ecosystem where painting has expanded into material, conceptual, communal, and process-based territories, that mission becomes more urgent than ever. The question is no longer whether the biennial is still necessary, but how it must transform in order to accompany the present.

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We tend to forget that medieval art was not art. We readily acknowledge that megaliths, cave painting, early ceramics, or Paleolithic figurines were not conceived for aesthetic contemplation; this becomes less evident when considering a sculpture of a saint, a retablo, or a reliquary in a cathedral. Their functions were multiple and diverse, ranging from accompanying social life and exalting the spirit to operating as pedagogical tools. Before the notion of autonomous art—formulated in Europe around the fifteenth century and refined in the salons of the eighteenth—images existed because they were necessary and because they were used.

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Before entering, the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum requires the visitor to shed all ideological prejudices associated with the white cube and its historical role in the Cold War: as a space of “neutrality” for the aesthetic and political deployment of the United States in its struggle with Europe and the rest of the world. The Anahuacalli functions simultaneously as an anthropology museum, a personal archive, a pyramid of worship, and a popular house for cultural encounters. In a space so heavily coded, temporary exhibitions pose a museographic and critical challenge, since one must not only place new objects alongside the thousands already present, but also imagine space where it seems not to exist. The task is one of organizing by subtraction.

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My cellphone has stopped functioning at optimal speeds due to the vast accumulation of sentimental information: photographs in multiple styles and framings, voice notes overanalyzing romantic and work situations, videos meant to shorten distances, stickers, and spam. Faced with this excess of materialities, one cannot help but wonder what will become of all our personal files. Notas de Voz [Voice Notes] is an installation by artist Elsa-Louise Manceaux at Museo Jumex that also allows information to pass through. Curated by Marielsa Castro, Rosela del Bosque, and Natalia Vargas, the exhibition consists of three paintings onto which typographies are projected—typographies that function as containers for different kinds of messages and words, as well as translations of the artist’s own voice notes. The intimate dimensions of the work become evident the moment we hear gentle intonations—some urgent—and varied accents circulating through the gallery space.

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