Onda MX | Mexico art radar

Magazine

Review

Dust of Late Capitalism and Final Judgment Jewelry: Cristóbal Gracia at Pequod Co.

by M.S. Yániz

Reading time

4 min

In the often-cited Thesis IX On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin mentions Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus. This fragment constructs an allegory of progress: a winged angel looks toward the past while a storm propels it into the future, unable to stop. The movement leaves behind a singular catastrophe that reaches the heavens. This image has been used to interpret various cultural and political phenomena within the epistemic framework of modernity and the ideology of the new. That unstoppable angel can either reveal our unresolved doom or the possibility of critique, as in its backward gaze lies the urge to judge production, while simultaneously producing its own barbarity.