the other regard at zona maco - gomezdetuddo...to cosmetic surgeries. the other regard at zona maco...

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Z ona Maco is an annual Contemporary Art Fair held at the Banamex Centerin Mexico City. It is considered the most important art fair in Mexico and one of the principal art showcases in all of Latin America. Over ninety five galleries

participated in this year’s fair with five hundred national and international artists and thirty thousand buyers and spectators.

However, this essay is not a general overview of the fair itself, but rather a very particular experience residing in my search of the human body as it is regarded in art. Walking along the corridors of Zon Maco I found myself searching for more than geometrical shapes. I found myself looking for skin, and more specifically the representation of female flesh and form.

I am always exploring the question of how the body of woman is being represented in art. Furthermore, how it is represented today among the new generation of artists? What work is fresh and new and what aspects are in the work of these creators? These questions take me on a search full of turns, textures and skin tones.

What I found at Zona Maco was womanhood worked from different materials, various sexual perspectives and gender identities, creators perpetuating a dialog about concepts of belonging, pleasure, pain, experience and the almost invisible line between these concepts and mixing them. When a peculiar body such as the female body is represented, we have to be open to the deconstruction and abstraction of it, as each artist builds it from a unique body experience.

I want to begin with two artists of the same Gallery -to b.art- (St. Barthélemy -FWI). My first dermal feminine blow in Zona Maco was from a distance, when I saw a big picture of a rebuilt and scarred body. As I approached I noticed an absent identity and the track of pain across a body that had been submitted to cosmetic surgeries.

THE OTHER REGARD AT ZONA MACO by Abigail Fuentes

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Alejandro Gómez de Tuddo (Mexico) shows us in Big Nude I, from his series Vanity Insanity, the honesty of a corporeal memory, the raw path of an aesthetic search across alteration. The game of reddish tones and the framed composition, allow us to speak with this body of exuberant breasts that invites us to enter it and form a tie of intimacy through pain.

The concepts of pain and body will never cease to pursue each other. And still today arriving at what is the accepted standard of beauty requires some pain, which we as women have learned and accepted. Jeanne Susplugas (France) exposes this with Peeping Tom’s house in a satirical but critical new way. With an installation in the shape of house she lets us watch projected slides, seen in the interior of the house through a narrow opening. And what is inside this voyeuristic house? Simply more common and accepted corporal addictions. Hair removal, embedding of objects for “good cleansing”, tissues and nail trimming and all the ways we use to improve and manipulate our external appearance.

This dictatorship of beauty is a story bound to our sex, a desire for beauty even if it hurts. Mahomi Kunikata (Japan – Kaikai kiki Gallery) brings to us, this pain of physical manipulation linked with the pleasure of sweets and consumption. Influenced by the Otoku culture of the sexually explicit Japanese manga, she communicates to us with the piece Kisa-chan and Maki-chan’s Super Cold Ice

Cream Play Set a comically raw creation. Its an introduction to psychologically obscure topics, with scenes of big-eye girls. Which between sweets, ice cream and blood, give themselves full hand pleasure. Kunikata, transmits her own insecurities that relies in relation to the body and to food. Certainly an approach that plays with the border between pain and pleasure, splashing the audience with an invitation to taste this sweet metaphor.

The body is also full of metaphors and throughout human history the female body has served as a metaphor in art. Here we have Rachel de Joode (Holland) in the booth of the Panamanian Gallery DiabloRosso telling us her visual reinterpretation of the planets. With different daily life objects, she plays with textures and colors, involving the feminine body by recreating emotions.






In The Residue of those Celestial Objects bound to our Sun by Gravity, Rachel de Joode creates a process of abstraction with the relation between the human being and the object. Her women are wrapped in this paraphernalia of objects, forming a rich collage of the current human iconography.

Appropriating the body through everyday objects gives us a sense of belonging. The close bond with tradition and popular iconography is linked to the female body and its daily life style. As a poetry hidden behind Zona Maco’s walls, the Viennese Gallery MAM (Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art Salzburg Vienna) delights us with a labyrinth of crochet, color and sculptures. Joana Vasconcelos (Portugal) with A Ilha Dos Amores exceeds the area of intimate dimension and creates a space to walk and contemplate these monumental Amazons wrapped in meticulously hand made crochet that ends with a luminescent universe; a dialog between the muses of the past and their testimony.

The Muse is a deity, but also a poetical inspiration. We cannot deny that women have been the muses of art, observers of the viewer, lost in time with her condition of innocence that almost touches us from beyond the sur face of the art piece. In case of the series of photographs Perfect Empathy by Slater Bradley (USA) displayed on the booth of the Gallery Max Wigram London, I find these young vulnerable but vital women, wrapped in metallic tones. The artist isolate them in order for them to bloom in the glow, relaxing them and making nervous the spectator.

I do not want to leave this corporal tour, without speaking about one of the most popular pieces at Zona Maco: La Puta de Babilonia by Emilio Rangel (México) better known as Miss Peggy Porn. SAK (Plastic Integration Workshop Mexico) displayed in their booth, an installation of exuberant Peggy’s, dominatrices lost in the enjoyment of their humidity. This Miss Peggy shows us the animal condition that is found inside of us, no matter the sex or situation. With epoxy clay and pigments, Emilio Rangel caricatures it with black humor, undoubtedly one of the most commented and visited pieces by the public.






Abigail Fuentes

Mexico City, May 2012

Whether it is a woman searching pain, lost in contemplation, or full of pleasure in their own body, the representation of these bodies is something that always resonates with our deepest identities and desires. Clearly there are many representations at Zona Maco of the female body both masculine and feminine perspectives. However the other regard at search, for the feminine skin, was launched within the corridors. Finding something that is ours, the body. And I believe that the appropriation of our body is only achieved through observation and knowledge.

I want to thank all the Artists and Galleries that kindly provide me an access to their images and regards.

the other regard at zona maco - gomezdetuddo...to cosmetic surgeries. the other regard at zona maco...

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