Ruben Ortiz Torres
Blag Flag
September 27, 2014–January 11, 2015.
Project Siqueiros: La Tallera
Venus 52
Cuernavaca
Morelos
Mexico
Bandera Negra (Black Flag), a new production of the artist Rubén Ortiz Torres, relates to David Alfaro Siqueiros’s plastic and ideological work, as he creates one of the most brilliant dialogs achieved over the last five years between art and politics—a perspective Proyecto Siqueiros keenly explores setting forth La Tallera as a vocational foundation.
According to Ortiz Torres, inserting himself among the modern issues of anarchist ideology, he can partake of a moveable condition that enables him to reach underground and alternative movements that haven’t yet found a space within the distribution of political power and its levels of representation. Therefore, this exhibition recuperates the historical revolutionary motto conceived by Ricardo Flores Magón: “Earth and Freedom,” to create its first representation standards: a chain of flags associated with the anarchic glimpses that allow the survival of political minority standpoints in contemporary society; thus anarchist flags—anarchist-capitalist or anarchist-gay (Bandera mariposa negra / Black Butterfly Flag, 2014)—are shown in the exhibition. But this research process also brings about the critical position and humorous attitude that has defined Ortiz Torres’s work back to his early creations—as well as the interwoven stories that emerge between historical narratives and popular culture.
A second pictorial body of this exhibition allocates in relation to the first material explorations—with products then foreign to the western painting canons—developed by Siqueiros. Research positions regarding materials that would define Siqueiros as a great modernist, and yet, at the same time, situates his work within a strong paradox in relation to the socialist realism agenda that the great mural