Jose Luis Cuevas:
Mexican artist Jose Luis Cuevas has been well-known since the 1950s for his depictions of society’s outcasts; essays on his work describe his figures as “grotesque,” “shocking,” or “horrifying.” But this exhibition at Aldo Castillo Gallery, his first in Chicago, suggests that the disquiet or discomfort his works produce is due not so much to his distortions of the human figure as to the fact that they’re all looking at us: we move through the gallery followed by countless eyes. No longer contemplative observers, viewers find themselves under constant surveillance.
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In the aquatint La carta (“The Letter”) four creatures, probably women, stare back at us. Almost filling the paper, cut off below the waist by the picture edge, and unified by a dark, watery monochrome, they give the impression of a reflection in a mirror. They do not interact with one another but gaze at us in an almost accusatory way; one of them holds up the letter of the title for us to see.
This allegory of defeated otherness, a tale in which all difference has been erased and condemned to resemblance, gives us a clue to the political content of Cuevas’s work. Cuevas’s mirror people represent the possibility of a rebellion by the different. In these pieces politics and the imagination are not mutually exclusive but form a seamless whole, placing his work firmly in the tradition of 20th-century Mexican art.
While most of Cuevas’s figures look self-conscious and aware of our gaze, like subjects posing for a photograph, occasionally they look as if they’ve been interrupted during some activity of their own to stare out at us. In the etching Pantla de noche, two creatures seem to have been checked in some strange erotic ritual; the title, except for the reference to “night,” doesn’t give much of a clue what it might be–“Pantla,” I’m informed, is the name of a beach in Mexico. Two strange beings, naked except for boots, are poised over a square of light surrounded by impenetrable darkness. The female figure, wearing boots to her thighs, reclines on one elbow, her head on her hand. But it’s the odd, dynamic male figure who raises questions about the suspended narrative. Is he lying down, getting to his feet from a blanket, or simply scrambling across the paper, dragging one foot behind him? From his angry look at us and the outlandish deformities of his limbs, he seems caught and held by our glance during the moment of transformation, from something resembling the human to something so incongruous and discordant it’s difficult for us to know or describe it.
