If archaeology as a scientific discourse claims that it is possible to make ruins speak from and on behalf of the past, for Javier Fresneda, ruins exist only in the present. Contingent, fragmented, manipulated through various material supports, dislocated in time and space, the remains of the past in Fresneda's work, ultimately inaccessible, reveal the archaeological gesture as a sensual, speculative, and libidinal practice.
The exhibition is structured around a series of images that are canonical in the official narrative of Mexican history and geography: reliefs from the archaeological site of Palenque, drawn by Guillermo Dupaix and Luciano Castañeda in the context of the Royal Antiquarian Expeditions of 1807; representations of typical Mexican landscapes from Carl Nebel's beautiful book Viaje pintoresco y arqueológico (1840); studies of Mexican historical caricature from the 19th and 20th centuries; the painting El Abrazo (1980) by Jorge González Camarena, picturing the “embrace” between the two cultures that gave rise to the Mexican nation.
Fresneda conjures up these different moments through visual essays that, far from fixing the past, multiply the possibilities of approximation to it, without renouncing precision and technical mastery. Above all, Fresneda is an accomplished artist who does not limit himself to offering conceptual challenges and riddles: his work has its concrete beginnings in his curiosity and wonder at the alchemical possibilities of matter and takes on meaning as he experiments with new processes and materials.
In the eight drawings on denim, which involve a demanding and controlled process—combining laser engraving, chemical lightening of the denim, stenciling, freehand drawing, and pigmentation with bitumen of Judea—a series of caricatured, anomalous, deformed characters emerge, layer after layer, against the backgrounds of Nebel and Castañeda's landscapes. With a nod to Nikolai Gogol's satirical story, where collegiate Kovaliov’s nose absurdly takes on a life of its own to wander around St. Petersburg, the noses/phalluses in the drawings on denim crawl around and hide from the sun in distinctly Mexican landscapes.
Fresneda’s woodwork takes shape through subtractive operations. The two articulated puppets, based on Camarena's painting and depicting the deadly embrace between the Mexica warrior and the Spanish soldier, play with the contrast between the cavities of the skeletons and the sensual fleshiness of the carving, to dislocate the perception of the passage of time.
In turn, in his interpretations of the reliefs of Palenque, Fresneda subtracts material to explore the generative possibilities of absence. The freestanding sculpture, based on the representation of the transfer of power between two Maya subjects, reads Dupaix and Castañeda's descriptions obliquely, to abstract a number of elements from the original scene and place at the center that which remains implicit in the Mayan reliefs: its enormous sensuality, its latent erotic desire.
Finally, the three panels of the folding screen explore what has been eroded in the original reliefs, evoking the effects of time on archaeological ruins. What is at stake in the refusal to restore the destroyed fragments? What is being played out at the edges of absence? Is it possible to rethink relations with vestiges, often assumed to be symbolically and materially solid, by accepting the challenge to look beyond what is said or what is visible?
If, despite all endeavor, the ruin reveals, above all, the impossibility of possessing it whole, Fresneda's work invites us to circulate among the ruins of his desires, to take pleasure in their materialities, and to open up spaces for speculation between their interstices.
—Miruna Achim