Miguel Rodríguez Sepúlveda

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO) presents the exhibition Fuga y entropía by Miguel Rodríguez Sepúlveda, curated by Mariana Mañón.

The exhibition Fugue and Entropy proposes a non-linear reading of the last 20 years of creation by the Mexican artist Miguel Rodríguez Sepúlveda, bringing together works that emphasise, through processes of meticulous repetition and seriality, the tension hidden behind central themes of our time such as identity, borders, economic inequality and the power of symbols.

Rodríguez Sepúlveda refers to entropy, a physical term and transversal axis of the exhibition, as the tendency of the universe to self-balance and generate order or stability. Transposed to art, the entropy of the social world is revealed through plastic strategies that challenge society's capacity for self-regulation: to what extent can identities and their foundational symbols (be it nationality or money as an index of inequality) be altered without losing their meaning? The works in this exhibition demonstrate the critical potential of this process of alteration to which the artist subjects the symbols of identity.

Fugue and Entropy brings together sculptural, video, drawing and installation pieces that highlight the artist's pursuit of altering and subverting meaning in the representation of archetypes of Mexican and Latin American culture. This iconoclastic positioning is directed in particular towards materials that form part of the collective or national identity, such as a coin with the eagle on it, or, for the post-revolutionary movement, a machete. In some of the works in this exhibition, the artist even uses the most intimate dimension of the body, his own and that of others, to provoke, through performative actions, a game of resistance that makes evident various identity and bio-political tensions.

By manipulating and destabilizing such diverse expressions of social memory, Rodríguez Sepúlveda forces us to ask ourselves what is the value of this collective imaginary for the present, revealing paradoxes that intertwine the dimensions of art, politics, and economics - without forgetting that behind this process of erosion and fading, the poetic gesture of creation can be glimpsed: to make us see, in our daily present, the tensions that give meaning to our collective existence.

— Mariana Mañón Sepúlveda

Image: installation view of Fuga y entropía, Miguel Rodríguez Sepúlveda, MARCO, 2023. Courtesy of MARCO.