Photo by Maria Fernanda Molins
“When I was in art school, making art with your hands or from a personal perspective was not popular,” says mixed media artist Nico Colón, who moved to Mexico City in 2013 from his native San Francisco. “I felt the need to challenge these assumptions, and being here has helped me create a mode of production of my own.”
Living in the Mexican capital, Colón began to print impressions of large tropical leaves he found in flower markets onto linen. Later he added additional layers with references to Mexican art history and Pop culture. This includes outlines of watermelons inspired by Rufino Tamayo, a famous Modernist Oaxaquenian painter and Speedy Gonzalez inverted figures reminiscent of Georg Baselitz neo-expressionist’s moves.
Labor, 2015, neon light, plexiglas, 132 x 98 x 8,5 cm, edition of 2 + AP, image courtesy the artist and New Galerie, photo: Aurélien Mole
In his recent show at Paris’s New Galerie entitled “Shared Risk”, Colón presented the viewer with large woodblock stamps, inked and ready to print but without the material necessary to do so. “It’s like an unfulfilled promise,” he explains. “My parents were part of the Chicano and Puerto-Rican brown power movements and when I was growing up they had a collection of silk-screened or block-stamped activist poster. Using the same technique and reflecting on those somewhat failed or incomplete political movements, allowed me to develop my own approach as well as a discourse on ideology. They are attempts to account for American art history as well as a recognition of the state of emergency the world is in.”
By turning politics into an aesthetic, there is a danger that Colón is arguably limiting political intervention to the sphere of the imagined. However, more persuasively, it also appears that in doing so, he is calling into question the basis for existing political ‘realities’, and therefore proving art’s ability to act as a space for progressive discussions and hope.
Promises Kept, 2015, woodblock stamp, ink, 244 x 122 x 7 cm, unique, image courtesy the artist and New Galerie, photo: Aurélien Mole
Nico Colón was featured as a “One to Watch” in Sleek issue #47, which can be purchased on our online shop today