At the 60th International Art Exhibition entitled Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger presents a large installation composed of 20 canvases that extend over 15 meters in length and 4 meters in height.
The work is intertwined with the legacy of Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera And David Alfaro Siqueiros, reinvigorating their influences and intertwining them with a distinctive imagery, that is, an artistic practice characterized by an overt feminism and a queer freedom that aims to open a space that looks beyond the current confinement of society within capitalist, colonial structures and exploitation that shaped it. Often visually reframing them to support radical thinking, social progress and a renewed connection with nature.
Who is Frieda Toranzo Jaeger
It is no coincidence that a single letter distinguishes her name from that of an icon of art history, Mexican like her: Frida Khalo. But Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, unlike those who preceded her, observes with a very careful eye the power relations that are established between male and female. He does not allow himself to be overwhelmed and, at times, destroyed by feelings. On the contrary, in Toranzo Jaeger’s artistic production a careful criticism of the representations of femininity and masculinity in the visual culture of late capitalism and above all of the stereotyped symbols of the latter dominates. Born in Mexico City in 1988, Toranzo Jaeger explores the medium of painting by criticizing it from within and causing it to literally collapse due to the weight of the artistic paradox par excellence: that is, the close link between the West and the art world. The history of figuration is often the narration of a part of the known world and only recently have we been trying, without too much effort, to propose alternative visions. So, with this objective in mind, the artist began to pierce the canvases with the embroidery technique, deeply linked to the traditions of his homeland. A sort of act of “epistemological disobedience against painting” which suggests that history in general is a construct devised by those in power.
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A self-supporting painting
Another fundamental concept of his artistic practice is that of “autonomy”: a central notion also of postcolonial theory. The painting thus frees itself from the one-to-one relationship with the back wall to occupy a much larger space, exploring other dimensions and getting closer to sculpture. The canvas structures designed by Frieda Toranzo Jaeger curiously take on a shape that makes them resemble gods motor vehicles: an allegory to talk about non-conforming bodies and to demonstrate how, sometimes, what seems to embody an idea of freedom and movement transforms into yet another means of constriction, similar to when one finds oneself closed inside a passenger compartment. Cars therefore become metaphors to describe the experience of “queer people, men and women of color in a system that doesn’t wish the best for us“. It is at this point that the spectator comes into play: by going around the exposed pictorial conformations, sitting inside them, he acquires a sort of control that allows him to externalize the sensations experienced without narratives imposed from the outside: freely.
Despite the constant construction work of queer utopias she does not consider herself an activist: she understands painting as a tool to analyze the male gaze and the underrepresentation of women, reiterating how necessary it is for humanity as a whole to rethink history and decolonize imagination, ideas and above all feelings. And this last point is perhaps the most difficult.
Elisabetta Roncati
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