Abraham Cruzvillegas at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City
Kurimanzutto, Mexico City February 9 – March 16
The third exhibition of Abraham Cruzvillegas at kurimanzutto, Mexico City, was an exercise in representation and interpretation. Titled “Esculturas pendientes” [Pending sculptures], and consisting of a series of site-specific sculptural arrangements in precarious ontological and formal balance, the exhibition resembled the surprising experience of a poetic reading. Cruzvillegas’ diverse practice involving collaboration, constant transformation and material improvisation is rooted in the personal experience of growing up in Colonia Ajusco, the artist’s childhood neighborhood in Mexico City. Inspired by the principle of autoconstrucción – a term employed to describe the precarious and collaborative building tactics used by the people of Ajusco to respond to the unstable local environment – Cruzvillegas turns it into a driving force to question personal and collective identity through materiality and re-appropriation. Entering through the gallery courtyard, we were confronted with a totemic large central sculpture, Esculturas pendientes 1 (2019), which seemed unstable at first glance, challenging some general notions of physics. Composed of three suspended used canoes, vertically oriented and engraved with drawings and written messages, the canoes were weighted down by natural rocks. Twelve other sculptural assemblages, Esculturas pendientes 2-13 (2019), sometimes connected one to another by fragile threads and ropes, unfolded throughout the gallery, each formed by a unique and meaningful constellation of materials: building-related objects left on construction sites, beams, buckets and rods, industrial materials such as plywood, plastic and Formica, as well as volcanic rocks and the tezontle – used in Pre-Hispanic architecture – along with different types of wood. Conveying the sense of a moment, each configuration might appear at first glance to be about to crumble or succumb to gravity, yet instead there is a monumental stillness, as if the works were uncannily frozen in time. A variety of local plants, all from the mineral-rich volcanic area of the district of Coyoacán, intermittently grew from the sculptures. Created in collaboration with local botanists, the natural landscape unveiled the conditions of life and its roots, offering another point of self-exploration.Cruzvillegas’ sculptural language evolves through contrast by embracing a complexity of forms and meanings to explore Mexican history and cultural identity. Hard and soft, living and ancient, heavy and light, strong and flexible are intuitively connected, entangled as new incarnations. The juxtaposition of different registers is harmonious and precise, simultaneously conveying notions of archaeology, economics, industrialization, ecology and animism.