Blind self portrait looking through the window after some minutes of mutual oral sex, 2012
Abraham Cruzvillegas
© Courtesy of the artist
Collection
Acrylic paint on newspaper clippings, cardboard, photograhs, drawings, postcards, envelopes, tickets, vouchers, letters, drawings, poster, flyer, cards, recipes, napkins and steel pins on wall.
400 x 200 cm
“I've been making a series of sculptures out of numerous painted papers—I call them Blind self portraits that I make collecting all kind of papers from everyday life. It is formed by a group of pieces of painted paper, that describe my everyday activities. Obviously I like the idea of transforming information into objects. These grids are to be read as accumulative and random organizations. It is a sort of a super honest diary in which viewers have to ‘believe’ in the accumulation of experience.”
––Abraham Cruzvillegas
Blind self portrait looking through the window after some minutes of mutual oral sex is part of a series by Abraham Cruzvillegas entitled Blind self portraits. These works are composed of masses of paper-based ephemera—flyers, newspaper cuttings, postcards and travel tickets, napkins, and other fragments collected from around the world—which are covered with layers of paint and then pinned to the wall. The paint covers the true nature of its paper support, giving the pieces an obscured sense of nothingness and hapless displacement against the white gallery wall. The individual components are normally arranged in a grid-like fashion and almost resemble an overhead view of a city or the patchwork of industrialized farmland. They are commonly painted monochrome or alternating between two colors like the one on display here with half of the work painted pink and the other half gray. The titles also oftentimes describe the particular situation Cruzvillegas finds himself in around the time of the work’s creation, in some cases giving an indication into the particular political or historical moment, mentioning current affairs or music contemporaneous to when it was made. While the larger political context is absent from the work on display here, the title suggests intimacy, a work that focuses on the experiential and the sensual.
*1968 in Mexico City, Mexico | Living and working in Mexico City, Mexico
400 x 200 cm
“I've been making a series of sculptures out of numerous painted papers—I call them Blind self portraits that I make collecting all kind of papers from everyday life. It is formed by a group of pieces of painted paper, that describe my everyday activities. Obviously I like the idea of transforming information into objects. These grids are to be read as accumulative and random organizations. It is a sort of a super honest diary in which viewers have to ‘believe’ in the accumulation of experience.”
––Abraham Cruzvillegas
Blind self portrait looking through the window after some minutes of mutual oral sex is part of a series by Abraham Cruzvillegas entitled Blind self portraits. These works are composed of masses of paper-based ephemera—flyers, newspaper cuttings, postcards and travel tickets, napkins, and other fragments collected from around the world—which are covered with layers of paint and then pinned to the wall. The paint covers the true nature of its paper support, giving the pieces an obscured sense of nothingness and hapless displacement against the white gallery wall. The individual components are normally arranged in a grid-like fashion and almost resemble an overhead view of a city or the patchwork of industrialized farmland. They are commonly painted monochrome or alternating between two colors like the one on display here with half of the work painted pink and the other half gray. The titles also oftentimes describe the particular situation Cruzvillegas finds himself in around the time of the work’s creation, in some cases giving an indication into the particular political or historical moment, mentioning current affairs or music contemporaneous to when it was made. While the larger political context is absent from the work on display here, the title suggests intimacy, a work that focuses on the experiential and the sensual.
*1968 in Mexico City, Mexico | Living and working in Mexico City, Mexico