Wendy Cabrera Rubio’s artistic proposal reproduces two paintings that appear in Mexican political caricatures, which were published during the Cold War. The reproductions were made with plain-colored textiles on strechers in order to emphasize their scenographic quality and indicate a distance as much from the history of the painting as from the pictorial gesture. In these works, Cabrera Rubio explores the construction of the idea of abstract art in a context such as Mexico’s and highlights the undercurrent of the Cold War in the artistic production of the period. Two of these works make reference to the “Salón ESSO”, a painting prize for young artists that was auspiced by the Organization for American States and the American company Satandard Oil, ESSO. The artist recreates the paintings by cartoonist Vadillo in his “Motivos abstractos? / Abstract Motives?”, which depict a group of wealthy people standing before a work of seemingly abstract art in which two “motives” are emphasized (in the pictorial and the economic sense): the OAS and ESSO (written with a dollar sign in place of an “S”). In the second painting, a millionaire, an American nationalist, and a man with a box of Coca-Colas appear, which in an act of colonialism abstractly presents an indigenous Mexican holding a banner of nationalism. Both images use well-known signs to call attention to the intense and well-known dispute between committed art and abstract art (the Rupture); in other words, between the muralists—representatives of figurative, nationalist, and politicized painting—and the abstract movement, identified by the former as cultural intervention on the part of United States imperialism.

—Christian Gómez