The drawings, made employing a broom, portray different primates: orangutans, chimpanzees, baboons, macaque, bonobos, gorillas, mandrills, gibbons, lemurs, langurs, colobus, and guenus.
During the recent years Abraham Cruzvillegas has been working in a project entitled Auto-
construción, manifested through different media, like books, a film, a music album and se-
ries of performances. Besides this, he has made a series of sculptures and a scenic project
held in kurimanzutto in 2010,
Last year, after completing his residency at DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch
Dienst) in Berlin, with the project “Self Builders’ Groove” and after exhibiting “Autocon-
strucción: the Optimistic Failure of a Simultaneous Promise” at Modern Art Oxford, the
artist returns to Mexico presenting “Nuestra imagen actual: autorretratos recientes”
at kurimanzutto.
The show is composed by a selection of three by four meter drawings made employing a
broom as if it was a brush and using black acrylic paint over Kraft paper painted white and
treated with water-based varnish. The drawings portray different primates: orangutans,
chimpanzees, baboons, macaque, bonobos, gorillas, mandrills, gibbons, lemurs, langurs,
colobus, and guenus.
In relation to this new project, the artist states:
“In 1844, after being exiled to the island of Jejudo, the Korean painter and calligrapher Kim
Jeonghui wrote a letter to his friend and interpreter Yi Sangyeok in order to thank him for
the books he had sent him from Pekin. The letter, aside from some brief strokes that aspire
at being ideograms, is a drawing of a house in the midst of winter, with two dry pines repre-
senting fortitude towards adversity. The drawing, done without any pretention of virtuosity,
is a statement of principles, a philosophical and political legacy, a revolution through writing,
calligraphy and drawing. It is also, let us not forget, an affirmation of love, friendship and
solidarity.
A couple of months ago, as I endured Berlin’s winter, I recovered a practice from years
back: drawing primates with wall paint on Kraft paper painted white. I used to draw them
with pens, with lots of detail and patience, then I moved to monoprints and now I do
them hastily, elementally, almost as dancing over the enormous sheets of white-painted
paper. I continued with the series after returning to Mexico in a large format that requires
preparation time, printing the sheets with varnish paint layer after layer and then using the
broom to draw on them, with the simple and unpolished gestures of our closest relatives.
Once I read that gorillas are genetically closer to humans than zebras to horses; that is why
I started portraying them. Then, as I did them, as a therapy or as some inefficient or medita-
tive practice, I started discovering amazing similarities between cynocephaly, orangutans,
guenus, giant baboons, catarrhinis and my own parents, brothers, aunts, grandparents
and cousins. My aunt Amalia was almost identical to a rhesus macaque and Rogelio, my
father, was without a doubt the closest thing to a baboon. I sometimes dream I am a silver
furred gorilla.
Military governors from dictatorial and coup regimes were colloquially called gorillas, which
is obviously a great injustice to the animals. In one of the front pages of El Diario de México
dating from 1966, through an alleged printing error, the two captions from a picture of
orangutans arriving at the Chapultepec zoo and a picture of a gas pumper convention pre-
sided by the infamous face of president Gustavo Días Ordaz (who the people had already
nicknamed El Chango: Te Ape) were switched. The newspaper was shut down by the gov-
ernment and El Chango continued being (as everybody knows) an oppressor.
In Mexico, cartoonists are called moneros because they draw monitos (funny characters,
literally “little monkeys”). Around one hundred years ago, a dinner downtown renamed itself
“Los Monotes” after the young artist José Clemente Orozco exhibited there his drawings
done on cardboards which were large format cartoons, big monitos so to speak. At the
time Orozco had only had one formal exhibit, composed mainly of bitter cartoons about the
revolution which had shaken the country for almost a decade, although some think it never
ended. Besides representing the cruel destruction of war, Orozco also included drawings
of prostitutes and urban characters similar to those of “Los Monotes” series.
A couple of weeks ago I went back to Korea, were I recovered not only my love for callig-
raphy and drawing, but also the pride for my opposable thumbs and my humbleness in the
face of the fierce and destructive nature that stirs within us. And although we continue living
in a regime of repression and war, other than the one government is supposed to be leading
against drug traffickers and the uncontrollable sicarios, a war of fear and cornering of public
society, I would like to recover for myself the pride in being an animal, a beast, or a monkey.
Press and communication
Lucía Díaz Alvarez tel (5255) 52562408 lucia@kurimanzutto.com
kurimanzutto
Feria de Av. Revolucion y Mixcoac - Mexico
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