Los Mutantes

2012 - Installation (Installation)

170 frames, each 9.53H x 3.07W x 1.18D inches

Pedro Reyes

location: Mexico City, Mexico
year born: 1972
gender: male
nationality: Mexican
home town: Mexico City, Mexico

Pedro Reyes’s Los Mutantes ( Mutants , 2012) is composed of 170 plates that combine characters from ancient and modern mythologies. As in a periodic table, animals and objects are combined with humans (male or female), providing a rational framework for the irrational products of human imagination. A Cartesian matrix such as this must follow certain rules. All figures are half-human, half-something. Animal/cartoon characters that speak, such as Fritz the Cat or Donald Duck, are excluded, as well as oddities and chimeras without recognizable human features. Their arrangement results in combinations such as fish plus woman equals mermaid; bull plus man equals minotaur, and so on. The juxtapositions cross figures from pop culture with those from ancient myths, encouraging us to notice similarities between religious icons and comic-book characters. All of these “mutants” reveal something about our desire to extract qualities of animals or objects and empower ourselves with them. Mythologies are a reflection of the paradigms of their time, and this kind of periodic table presents a rational framework to categorize irrational products of the imagination.


Pedro Reyes’s works traverse the worlds of art, film, architecture, design, social criticism, and pedagogy. Educated as an architect, Reyes draws on this training to engage with utopian aspirations and the ongoing legacy of Modernism, often focusing on issues of scale and space while questioning pressing social issues through the incitement of individual or collective interaction. Although only a few of his works are directly located within the practice of building, almost all involve some kind of construction, whether they are objects, models, interiors, or social spaces. Reyes also makes use of strategies developed for communication or education, as well as everyday humor, to engage his audiences. Many of his works either allow large-scale public engagement or suggest a possible use: weapons turned to shovels, multilevel parks in old modernist buildings, and small spherical rooms. Like many avant-garde thinkers of the past, Reyes constructs new forms of architecture necessary for new ways of life.


Colors:



Other related works, blended automatically

Canned Laughter
© » KADIST

Yoshua Okón

2009

Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...

Wright Imperial Hotel
© » KADIST

Abraham Cruzvillegas

2004

Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...

Sunday (Domingo)
© » KADIST

Rivane Neuenschwander

2010

In this video, a parrot chews on seeds printed with punctuation marks...

Why fear the future?
© » KADIST

Carlos Amorales

2005

Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...

100 Boots
© » KADIST

Eleanor Antin

1973

Comprised of fifty-one photographic postcards, Antin’s 100 Boots is an epic visual narrative in which 100 black rubber boots stand in for a fictional “hero” making a “trip” from California to New York City...

Until It Makes Sense
© » KADIST

Mario Garcia Torres

2004

Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...

Vulnerabilia
© » KADIST

Jonathan Hernández

2008

In line with Hernández’s interest in catastrophe, Vulnerabilia (choques) is a collection of images of shipwrecks and Vulnerabilia (naufragios) collects scenes of car crashes...

Third Realm Venice Series #2
© » KADIST

Jompet Kuswidananto

2011

Third Realm (2011) grew out of the artist’s long-term research of Indonesia’s colonial history and the processes of modernization and urbanization that have taken place there...

From the series Las Mariposas Eternas (the Eternal Butterflies)
© » KADIST

Adrian Villar Rojas

2010

The two drawings in the Kadist Collection are part of a larger series entitled Las Mariposas Eternas (The Eternal Butterflies)...

Lightning
© » KADIST

Paul Kos

1976

Parked on the shoulder of a single lane highway running through a desert landscape, Marlene looks over her shoulder from inside the car at a fierce storm looming over a distant horizon...

Interrupted Passage
© » KADIST

Julio Cesar Morales

2008

The video Interrupted Passage presents a performance Morales staged in the former home of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a mid-nineteenth-century Mexican general serving in California...

Mapa Mundi BR (postal)
© » KADIST

Rivane Neuenschwander

2007

Mapa-Mundi BR (postal) is a set of wooden shelves holding postcards that depict locations in Brazil named for foreign countries and cities...

Mimbres pottery kill hole sequence
© » KADIST

Mariana Castillo Deball

Mariana Castillo Deball’s set of kill hole plates are part of a larger body of work problematizing archeological narratives, and drawing attention to the conservation process and its role in recreating an imagined object...

Perro en Tlalpan (Dog in Tlalpan)
© » KADIST

Gabriel Orozco

1992

Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...

The Individual Is a Mirage
© » KADIST

Erick Beltran

2010

In his posters, prints, and installations, Erick Beltrán employs the language and tools of graphic design, linguistics, typography, and variations in alphabetical forms across cultures; he is specifically interested in how language and meaning form structures that can be misconstrued as universal...

The Transparencies of the Non-Act
© » KADIST

Mario Garcia Torres

Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969...