Enrique Chagoya: Mindful Savage’s Guide to Reverse Modernism

Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Art Practical staff writer Brian Karl reviews Enrique Chagoya's solo exhibition Mindful Savage's Guide to Reverse Modernism at Anglim Gilbert Gallery at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco, California.

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O Que Goya!

In his solo show at Anglim Gilbert’s new space at Minnesota Street Project’s arcade-like gallery complex, Enrique Chagoya sifts through the detritus of cultural production from past eras to generate his own new composites of cultural reappropriation. The results offer sometimes incisive, sometimes bemused commentary on the larger politics of “doing” culture. Sharing the perspectives of a sort of outsider to those cultures he mines—the “alien,” which he references at times explicitly in titles and large handpainted captions for his pieces—Chagoya pushes back at centuries of others’ prevailing cultural imperialisms.

In the widely varying implementations of his overarching theme of a Mindful Savage's Guide to Reverse Modernism, and with a gimlet eye and sureness of hand, the artist messes joyfully with layers of tropes and a range of media. These include caricatured elements of iconic modernist imagery by past masters such as Picasso and Warhol, Yves St. Laurent’s Mondrian design dress knock-off (the Mondrian motif recurs prominently throughout the show), and recontextualized portraits of numerous artistic “heroes” of modernism themselves (Buñuel, Corbusier, Duchamp) in a series of photo lithographs.

Enrique Chagoya. Illegal Alien’s Guide to the Theory of Surplus Value, 2009; acrylic and water based oils canvas; 80 x 120 in. Courtesy of Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco. 

In one extended such riff, two sets of framed digital prints under the shared title Canibales Daguerrotipicos (2015) place the shadowy figure from Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous 1932 photograph Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare fleeing Edgar Curtis’ portrait of a Native American on horseback. The warrior’s proportions and placement relative to other pictured elements, along with his heedlessness to Cartier-Bresson’s smaller figure, bestow him with a sort of dominance in the larger field of the collaged composition. That same warrior’s obliviousness to a nearby billboard ad for an iPhone suggests that for all his retaking of power or at least pride of place, the looming menace of ever more modern commerce, marketing, and surveillance is always still threatening.

Adding to an ongoing pileup of reappropriative cultural table-turning are various prints and paintings emulating the form of Mayan codices, including more than one like Illegal Alien’s Guide to Mindfulness (2016) in which Chagoya portrays himself in a range of costumes such as a Mexican wrestling mask, peasant sombrero, and various ethnographic headgear from other cultures. In another sprawling project, Recurrent Goya (2012), Chagoya updates his half-namesake’s etchings in the Caprichos series by reflecting more contemporary moments (Obama, for instance).

Enrique Chagoya: Mindful Savage’s Guide to Modernism is on view at Anglim Gilbert at Minnesota Street Projects, in San Francisco, through May 14, 2016.