Bombón

Alida Cervantes is a Mexican artist who lives and works in the Tijuana and San Diego border region. Traveling daily between the US and Mexico, Cervantes’ work is characterised by an interest in power relations between race, class, gender and even species. She explores these hierarchies both at the level of sexual or intimate relationships and on the broad stages of history and politics. Cervantes earned a BA from the University of California, San Diego (1995), then studied at Florence’s Scuola di Arte Lorenzo de’ Medici for two years. In 2013, she earned her MFA from the University of California, San Diego.

The two works in ‘Virile’ take their departure from historical portraiture, exploring patriarchal legacies and post-colonialism through their abstracted representation of colonial viceroys. In ‘Juan Vicente era drogodependiente, electroluminiscente, y parce que áciddorresistente’ (2021), the artist shows a historical subject in full military regalia – distorting his form with thick impasto oil paint on aluminium. In ‘Bombón’ (2021), the subject of the elderly statesman appears almost tarnished and decaying, wild-eyed and pantomime-faced against a background of aggressive and energetic sgraffito. Despite the atrocities they channel, Cervantes’ work possesses a lightness of touch and dark humour, exposing how such masculine posturing both masks and manipulates.