Naturaleza Muerta is the result of a dialogue between Jonathan Hernández and Pablo Sigg based on a back-and-forth exchange of ideas, affinities and differences.

Naturaleza Muerta is an exercise in dissecting social and mental landscapes through various works, including sculptures, videos, collages and an installation.

An inventory of the consciousness of time in the unconscious or a photographic archive about fragility are this project's driving forces; forces that perform their own conceptual shifts: from the documentary to the sculptural, form the intentional to the anthropological, from the visible to the invisible.

The implications of the inert object and of the object of inertness are Naturaleza Muerta's common denominator. Psycho-geography is the terrain on which Hernández and Sigg conceived this crossroads, where a hypnosis session and a maze lay at the exhibition's crux.

Mexican Elephant/Roger Bartra

Jonathan Hernández and Pablo Sigg propose an interesting situation based on Marcel Broodthaers's 1965 piece made up of two human femurs painted with the colors of the Belgian and French flags. The artist fused nationality with the structure of a human being. 

When faced with the femur of a "Mexican elephant" we encounter an intriguing problem: can there be such a thing as a Mexican elephant? It is an obvious contradiction since there are only African and Asian elephants. Therefore if this femur belongs to an elephant that lived in captivity in Mexico, it actually belongs to a foreign animal or, at most, to a 'Creole' one born in Mexico to foreign parents. But since passports aren't issued to elephants nor do they have a nationality, the artists decided to paint the femur with the colors of the Mexican flag. This way we have a femoral pachydermal and patriotic identity as false as Magritte's pipe which, as we know, is not a pipe. Bones are not only good for gnawing: they are also good for inspiring thought. Is there a Mexican idnetity? Is there Mexican art? Is there Mexican philosophy? Or are there, in reality, only representations? Perhaps there are only people (artists and philosophers) living in Mexico, some of whom invent identities in order to criticize them, to worship them or merely to have a bone to pick with the artists. Other people paint elephant femurs...