que te vaya bonito is an expression as much as an incantation, a benevolent utterance immersed in generosity and altruism. It is an authentic manifestation of what facing one another in impermanence means. It fosters sincere bonds of reciprocity and recognition regardless of the outcome. And it is also a farewell that gives way to new beginnings.
This exhibition offers a space for the contemplation of these ideas and a testament to the dedication of the participating artists to each other and their community. que te vaya bonito is Tactile!’s inaugural group exhibition, showcasing eleven practitioners working in abstract, lyrical, and landscape painting along time-based work and sculptural forms that seem to suspend the transient.
que te vaya bonito is tinged with melancholy, too. Renowned ranchera vocalist Vicente Fernández, in his 1974 heartfelt song bearing the same title, sings, “que te vaya bonito… que se acaben tus penas,” a feeling echoed in Valeria Guillén’s weeping teardrop which cries tears that rustle like leaves. This is also true in Kyle Joseph’s fluorescent curvaceous sculpture, which recontextualizes its steel components in a new arrangement as if these pieces had always yearned to be something else from the beginning; Luis Colina’s abstracted shipwreck depicts a bleak, irremediable scene, tinged in sorrow reflective of the realities of migration; and Jon Millan’s clay stack stacks hope for intergenerational well-being.
Rafael Alvarez and Alejandro Valencia explore the scale of que te vaya bonito through hovering organic forms that bracket the experience of this goodwill between the cosmic macro and the biological micro. At the same time, Patricia Monclus’ tranquil, lush landscape is inhabited by rabbits seemingly moving in acquiescence from or towards something that looms outside our vision. While Emma Del Rey’s images give us a meditative glimpse, a search into an inner landscape of acceptance. Frankie Morales’ lyrical and narrative painting presents an almost dichotomic creationist story with characters caught between forces of union and separation. And Anthony Anaya’s & Gabriela Beltran’s video work is concerned with perception and the relational as temporal.
Tactile! warmly invites you to gather in kindheartedness, awareness, and curiosity for this moment, knowing that we, too, will bid each other farewell.
And when that happens,
que te vaya bonito.
* Curated by Jon Millán for Tactile!
Valeria Guillén’s (b. 1992, Tegucigalpa, Honduras) process-based and permutative practice generates a series of auspicious symbols and conditions that playfully ask us to reconsider language hierarchies, materiality, and humor. These seemingly familiar forms presented comically and absurdly are authentic to the issue they reference. Whether it is toilet paper represented ad infinitum (berating the fallacies of late capitalism’s production systems) or an irreverent figure of a public defecator, Guillén uses humor in the face of collapsing societies that have equated amassing toiletries as a sign of progress. Reminiscent of the aesthetics of rebusque in the tropics—a process of defining a problem (or the solution to a problem) in terms of (a simpler version of) itself—Guillén taps into plasticity as an expanded attitude where materials respond directly to environments of scarcity and uncertainty, encouraging us to question their physical and cognitive potentials. Guillén’s practice exists then not just because of the language of art but despite it.
cada quién hace de su trasero un florero blooms joyously and optimistically towards the heavens, ascending above the viewer from a pair of gluteal ceramic cylinders. Our gaze is encouraged upwards from these bowels high onto a utility jacket which sits atop like a finial, a bud, a call for autonomy and a promise of transformation. the belly button of the wall doubles down on bodily excretions by foregrounding a defecating caganer, a peasant figure, commonly displayed (and displaced) within nativity scenes. It symbolizes abundance and mundanity, squatting in contrast to the abstract divine order. The caganer becomes central to Guillén’s almost documentarian, historical painting as the sacred recedes in space. Alluding to Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, Guillén consecrates the caganer’s public defecation, the disregard for decorum, as a source of authenticity. The contracting sphincter hints towards a different origin of the world, one that rises from the ability to transmute debris into life—or, as Ben Okri affirms, “the universe loves debris, you see. it makes of it stars and constellations… to make art out of rubbish is a divine thing.”
A sustainable ecosystem is only complete with composters. In to extrude, to abject, the flies orbit an extruded coil embodying this role without hesitation. Their motivations are transparent, genuinely buzzing, encircling an orange spiral (a color that induces appetite against a pattern that produces nausea). Perhaps a reference to artists working in the emetic context of late capitalism (and tethering democracies), trying to churn meaning out of shit. may you live a life of prosperity rounds off this series of works by delving into simultaneity and time (as seven red noses correspond to the days of the week). These snotty pinned noses refuse to inhale the scent of putrefaction, but Guillén reminds us that things are always in motion in the presence of death.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice or Bootleg Mickey makes escobas pa’ limpiar references Fantasia (1940), where a series of animated brooms are brought to life to complete the protagonist’s cleaning assignment. Guillén’s drawings echo each other proportionally, and the subject spawns in multiples as the series diminishes in size (the self-storage unit conundrum). The reference to bootlegged-ness is not accidental, and it tells us of a different type of Mickey, a copy of a copy, an unseen laborer. This unlicensed likeness exists free and outside of standardization and copyright, replicating and adapting itself—even deep in mercados and plazas in Tegucigalpa. Bootleg Mickey isn’t necessarily the lazy chaser of instant gratification, a trying-to-cut-ahead-of-the-line figure who outsources his work to indentured animated brooms; instead, Mickey pirateado, mid-abjection, recognizes the autonomy of the tool and the system it operates within to provide clever solutions that transform his material conditions.
Overall, Guillén’s thesis proposes an ecosystem of prosperity in the face of dejection. These works bestow good fortune onto anyone willing to immerse themselves in abjection as a means of emancipation.
(published for Columbia University School of the Arts, 2024)
* Curated by Fawz Kabra
