Cannibal Palimpsest by Enrique Chagoya, at Artium from October

Mexican artist Enrique Chagoya (Mexico City, 1953), based in San Francisco for over two decades, will be presenting his first display in a European museum (Artium). The show will include a selection of paintings, drawings, engravings, editions, some sculptures, and the most characteristic element of his artistic corpus: his famous codex.

Created on original amate paper – a kind of paper that was used by the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican natives, produced with the bark of amate tree, rubber plant family, brought by the artist from his native Mexico natal -, these codex are to be read from left to right, just like the ones made by their pre-Columbian ancestors, and develop a series of scenes that, with a patina of irreverent humor, deploy the characteristic iconographic repertoire of Chagoya.

The artist, who combines his creative work with the educative one he carries out at the prestigious Stanford University, marries characters taken from the comics, cartoons and popular culture with faces from the politic, economy and religion spheres. He adds his own invention and configures a multi-layer imaginary.

His cannibalism is a sort of symbolic anthropophagy that uses social critic and politic satire to develop what he has named «inverse anthropology».

His work, the whole exhibition, can be understood as a temporal, iconographic, symbolic and politic palimpsest, a cannibal palimpsest.

The show, curated by Blanca de la Torre, will be open in Artium from October 4 to January 12, 2014.

Source: Press release