In a significant way, “Anteanoche” (The Night Before Last) is a reboot for Los Angeles–based Commonwealth and Council’s Mexican adventure. The gallery opened just last year in Mexico City, nestled in a cozy space shared with Galería Agustina Ferreyra, with whom it staged alternating exhibitions, one month each. Commonwealth and Council now occupies a different renovated apartment across the patio from Agustina’s. This first show in the new space, which was also the gallery’s first in the city to feature exclusively local artists, appeared set on proving that a group show can be potent and coherent—and it succeeded. The curatorial approach was more expressionist than cerebral: The pieces, by six artists, shared an attitude at once threatening and vulnerable, like a perfectly cute pit bull showing its teeth.
Alan Hernández was a revelation here. His work is usually exhibited in the context of queer aesthetics, where readings of it often get pared down to the most univocal. Here his art got to show off its full menacing, visceral range. Hanging on the wall of the first room was Rizoma (Rhizome), 2020, a human-size sculpture made of steel and fabric that eerily mimicked a life-form: a droopy brain sustaining ribbonlike stretches of veins, nerves, and feathers—what an alien might be inspired to create after dissecting a humanoid. Candelabro (Chandelier), 2022, hung from the ceiling in front of it, looking at first like a delicate, if baroque, light fixture. But each lightbulb holder was decorated with a naked eyeball crying tears of crystal beads. These were body parts as ornament in a sick, not quite sexy way—and they were beautiful.
Another highlight was Cressida, a young Welsh-born artist who creates clay objects that appear as both ruins and fossils. This mixture of the mineral and the biological was best represented by The Place Where Smoke Cannot Escape, 2023, a sculptural cube studded with teeth or stalactites—take your pick—and with a maze of stairs at its center. Perhaps the exhibition’s most entrancing piece was Karla Ekaterine Canseco’s pedazos de perra (Bitch Pieces), 2023, a group of clay forms on the wall that turned out to be part sculpture installation, part performance, and part costume. For the opening night’s performance, Canseco, clad in a leather vest and a thong, removed the clay pieces and attached them to her arms and legs as if they were protective padding. Taking her time adjusting the tiny leather straps holding together the rigid black pads, she then tied some small, slightly repulsive claws to her knuckles and toes. The final touches were a hairless-tail butt plug and a ghastly mask: She was transformed into a Xoloitzcuintli, the ugly yet status-conveying Mexican hairless dog. Canseco went on to read a text about cultural entanglements, colonial relationships, and the twists of the tongue that overrun Mexican American relationships, fraught as they are with pettiness, misunderstandings, and the intrusion of mutual linguistic violation. The whole thing was touching, both too much and restrained at the same time, extremely vulnerable yet creepy and unnerving. Similarly, Milagros Rojas’s Cruces (Crosses), 2023, a smaller-scale encapsulation of her impressive large-format pencil drawings, provided a microscopic look into forms and materials battling each other to achieve dominance—a conflict that was also present in Balam Bartolomé’s strangely altered organic objects and in Rodrigo Rodríguez Ramírez’s blurry, fleshy paintings of bodies smashing into each other.
“Anteanoche” was ostensibly about speculative existence within a pulsating underworld: what might be alive in the shadows and caverns of humanism, what escapes its all-illuminating surveillant sight. The show succeeded in its sophistication: It was not espousing new-materialist posthumanist ideas to sell us back a utopian beyond, but was reminding us that interactions with otherness, however one chooses to delineate the category, are usually mired in chaos, fear, and harm—no matter one’s good intentions. Nature is not always harmonious, cuddly, or fair. Such qualifiers are of our own manufacture, reflecting a hierarchy of values that limits our imagination.
