Billionaires visiting the de la Torre Brothers: Upward Mobility exhibition at the McNay Art Museum had better brace for some scathing critique, with multiple installations skewering the wealthy for their greed and power.
But the 1% can rest assured that artists Einar and Jamex de la Torre consider most everyone complicit in the excess consumption of capitalism and risking the planet’s health.
“We’re a bit of a juggernaut when it comes to humanity,” said Jamex during a Wednesday morning media preview. “A lot of our work speaks about that, how we’re in the middle of something that’s hard to stop.”
Rebellion in the air
The centerpiece of the exhibition will test any arts writer’s vocabulary in describing the spectacularity of the de la Torres’ approach to making art: surfeit, plethora, cornucopia, horror vacui. Any term that captures a deliberate effort to overwhelm with deft combinations of color, pattern, materials and arrangements will apply.
The central Upward Mobility installation is a visual feast featuring an ornately decorated banquet table overflowing with handcrafted glimmering objects made from glass, doll parts and dyed resin and overhung by elaborate chandeliers.
Darker undertones are visible in the details, such as hollow-eyed baby doll forms cast in resin on the dinner plates, tiny toy soldiers trapped in tilted wine glasses, a “capitalist pig,” as described by Jamex, awaiting carving as the main dish and, most pointedly, one chandelier features human arms bearing broken bottles as candle holders, signaling readiness for a fight.
Cycles of history teach us, Jamex said, “that whenever there is extreme accumulations of wealth,” such as the informal competition to become the world’s first trillionaire, “there is also lingering resentment in the lower classes. And eventually everything goes up. … There is rebellion in the air.”
Us, too
But the brothers do not exempt themselves from responsibility. They make a point to avoid being preachy in their work, employing layers of bitter and irreverent humor amid grotesquery and stinging critique.
An installation including two lenticular prints — colorful, etched surfaces that contain multiple images viewable from slight shifts in perspective — creates a playfully incongruous relationship between Vladimir Putin’s military excesses and ancient Mesoamerican myths.
Coatzilla depicts the ancient Aztec goddess Coatlicue as a Godzilla monster, destroying Mexico City as she battles a Putinesque figure, Mictlanteputin, a dour mashup of the ancient Aztec god of the dead and the Russian premier. On the opposite wall, Mictlanteputin dominates a landscape alternating between hovering hummingbirds and industrial waste.
The de la Torre brothers created an animation projected onto the floor between the framed prints as a visual carpet, showing congested traffic running day and night around the Fuente de la Diana Cazadora.
“We are the monsters in this movie as well, so we’re stomping on the cars much like Godzilla is stomping on the city,” Jamex said.
Convergence of styles
The final room recreates a 2002 installation created for a border-themed exhibition in Los Angeles, titled Colonial Atmosphere. A lunar lander dominates the room in the form of a colossal Olmec face, with a Coatlicue figure as the astronaut standing near a metal rendering of a flag bearing the diamondback patterns of snakes.
Even before billionaires created their own space programs, “we wanted to take the border to the moon, and talk about the moon as a kind of last bastion of colonialism,” Jamex explained.
Walking back through the four rooms of the massive installation, a viewer might be overwhelmed by the dizzying convergence of art forms, mediums and styles from viceregal and baroque painting to chinoiserie and contemporary taxidermy bearing bling. But the first room both greets and sends off viewers with a lighter touch.
Blown glass luchador figurines stand atop pedestals, one a snake charmer holding a rattler, another pairing notorious cartel king El Chapo with a presidential figure, and another depicting a frog person of Slavic myth Vodyanoy that alludes to the brothers’ range of influences.
That figure dances in an ornately framed lenticular print dominating the red-walled room with Sufi dervishes atwirl in what appears to be an enclosure topped by barbed wire in the shadow of a stadium. The lenticular images toggle between the peaceful dance scene and the morbid remnants of a corpse-strewn battlefield, and between the pagan frog and a towering statue of a megalomaniacal autocrat.
The brothers said the lenticular form particularly suits their sensibilities because it allows up to 20 layers of imagery, feeding their desire to “include everything.”
The de la Torre Brothers: Upward Mobility exhibition opens Friday at the McNay and will remain on view through September 15, accessible with regular museum admission.
