Maribel Portela
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But Portela, who’s Mexican, is more artist than anthropologist; while her work is full of cultural echoes, she invents many of the details. She says that growing up surrounded by pre-Columbian art had an influence, but that her “passion” for living and for the 21 million people of Mexico City, each with “a story to tell,” was a bigger factor. While the narrow eyes of the figure in Drag–n de los cuatro vientos (“Four-Winged Dragon”) suggest that he’s Asian, the large white bird sitting on his head is the artist’s own invention, inspired by “thoughts of flying.” Portela thinks of the figure holding a starfish in Cazador de miradas (“Hunter of Gazes”) as an Australian aborigine, though the line drawings of plants and animals on his body could have come from many cultures. By mixing specific cultural references with invented ones, Portela gives her figures a universal quality; they reflect both human variety and similarity, reminding us that, as Armando Almaz‡n Reyes wrote in a catalog essay on Portela, “We are nothing but clay.”
The objects are just as disturbing. Some are said to be weapons used by the “Agency.” One looks a bit like a mousetrap but is ominously described as a machine that “can generate monsters and beasts who multiply exponentially.” One painting shows a man with a grotesquely fat face and wearing a sailor outfit who’s described as “one of the workers on the human livestock farm,” where “all kinds of human meats…for monsters” are processed.
