Renato Garza Cervera

Contemporary Art from Mexico City Renato Garza CerveraTEXTS

Renato Garza's Structures of Representation

Gilbert Vicario

Renato Garza's recent body of work explores the relationship of narative and representation through a surprising depiction of Central American gang members known as the Mara Salvatrucha . The Mara Salvatrucha is a Los Angeles-based, predominantly Salvadoran gang that is also active in Central America. The gang's name is commonly abbreviated as MS-13, Mara, MS or "posse" and is composed in Salvatruchas. It's name translates to "street-tough Salvadorans. The gang originated among Salvadoran emigrants living in Los Angeles but it has since spread to other parts of North America. It is said to have emerged in the 1980s during El Salvador's violent civil war and is estimated as of 2005 to have 50,000 members in Central American and between 8 to 10,000 members in the United States. The 13 is a gang number associated with Southern California and the 13 rules the gang follows.

MS-13 member typically have tattoos on most of their upper bodies with lettering done in a Gothic blackletter style. The MS and 13 is always tattoed resulting in the arrest and detention of many people for illicit association based entirely on the fact that they are wearing tattoes. Garza's Maras are hyperrealistic renditions of these gang members skinned and splayed like taxidermied animals. The excruciated facial expressions on the figures appear menacing yet hint at the scatalogical -- a fact that is corroborated by the carefully rendered hole meant to represent the anal region of the figure. Perhaps because of their elusive nature and social liability though, the Maras currently perform the emblematic tasks as both sign and signifiers of the current political fissure between the U.S.'s policy on homeland security and economic ties between undocumented workers from Latin America and most of the North American business sector.

Garza's Maras characterize more than a mere attempt at commenting on alternative economies though -- although the complex system of gang-related activities is astonishing in itself. Their proximity to another work, Escape II , 2006, happily creates the context for exploring a biblical reading of these individuals and their supposed politcal scapegoating. This particular reading is further complicated by the level of text and symbol represented in the tatoos that cover the skins of these figures. Although some of these codes are easily understood, others are more hermetic in nature. This binary narrative allows a complex field of interpretations to develop, including the one that makes certain individuals guilty by association.

As a conceptual endeavor, Garza's human-skin rugs maintain a stylized level of ambiguity that elevates the sculptures from a simplistic didacticism to a more complex field of interpretation. On a formal level they could be said to hearken back to the superrealist styles of John De Andrea or Duane Hanson, yet their semiotic overlay of hermetic codes, gang-related iconography, and visual sophistication allows a dialogic interplay to emerge. Perhaps because of a generational fatigue with conceptual and mimimalist iterations that have proliferated the international art scene for the last 15 years, artists like Renato Garza have begun to more effectively reintroduce notions of narrative through carefully-rendered representational structures that perform rather than merely represent.

Gilbert Vicario

9/19/2007

Contemporary Art from Mexico City Renato Garza CerveraTEXTS