DAAVOZZ

The Hour of Things

Objects have their hour of dying too. The Volkswagen Beetle —the vocho, as Mexico City calls it— reached its own in 2003, when the Puebla plant assembled the last one; since then it has slept in scrapyards with the patience of things that have done their work. DAAVOZZ goes looking for it there. In Mexico, myth changes clothes and stays, and his painting catches it in the middle of the change.

The technique carries the idea. He paints with hyperrealist accuracy: the dented sheet metal, rust spreading in patches, chrome that still holds a little sky. That truth of scrap keeps the Beetle from turning into a nostalgic postcard, and on it he can raise a rite without sliding into folklore. That is his strongest achievement: a craft of precision placed at the service of an iconography that, in other hands, would end up as a souvenir.

In Venciendo a la muerte (Tzompantli V) the Beetles are stacked like the skulls on the sacred rack of Tenochtitlan, and a xoloitzcuintle —the hairless dog that, in Nahua tradition, guided the dead to Mictlan— leans against the one at the center. In Coatlicue two of them, one red and one blue, meet head-on, and from that meeting rises the goddess’s double serpent head. In Bestiario No 1 one sprouts eagle wings and a child holds it by a string, like a kite trying to get away.

Elsewhere, ordinary people pass through. In Coyolxauhqui a young woman rests her face in her hands beside the goddess’s stone, as if waiting for something that is late. In Ometeótl a man in a black jacket spray-paints the door of an old colonial house, and a face answers him from the wall. In Transhumante a red monkey wears a soft-drink logo on its chest; in Nahual #1 a dancer leaps over the fire with the Wi-Fi symbol on his helmet. No one speaks, and yet you can hear them.

The inquiry reaches the support itself. In Acceso and in Coyolxauhqui he paints on cut-out artist’s palettes, so that the tool of the trade becomes part of the offering; in Viaje interno the Beetles leave the canvas and become an object. These are consistent choices in a body of work that keeps asking what we do with what we inherit.

In Transportando almas an orange Mexico City Metro train comes straight at us. A xolo is driving. At the front it carries the rusted cowcatcher of a locomotive nobody remembers, and in the half-erased letters behind it you can read Mictlán. The passengers cannot be seen. And yet the train is full.