Mexico City : A New Surrealist Face for Street Art

March 22, 2012 Artists, Features, Mexico, Mexico City, On the Street

Comic, surrealist, role-playing psychological explorations, with a tip of the hat to Breton, Carrington, and Lucha Libre, among others.

Pixel Pancho (photo © XAM)

Mexico City culture can be as varied and diverse as it is homogeneous, with a respect for tradition and, when it comes to artistic expression, a catalyst for exploration. André Breton is reported to have described Mexico as “the most surrealist country in the world,” where painters like Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo unhinged their imaginations from the limitations of the material world. As these new images on the streets of Mexico City taken by Brooklyn architectural street artist XAM show, the love for a psychic automatism continues into the public sphere.

Of course the Mexicans are not strangers to art on the streets; “great Latin American muralists” is a phrase almost synonymous with Mexico and names like Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros coming to mind. Political advocacy and populist criticism of social policy on the walls here is similarly a tradition respected by the culture. Now a century after the revolution and birth of the modern Mexico, the experience of Los Capitalinos, as the residents of Mexico City are called, is affected daily by surrealism, pop culture and global capitalism swimming alongside folk and historical symbology, and a bit of anarchy. It’s all part of one fabric, a rich and varied textile that we export to you here.

Ben Eine (photo © XAM)

Says XAM of his experience, “Barcelona, NYC, Amsterdam, and Paris are all similar in a way when it comes to street art – you can walk around and come across work on the streets fairly easily, but traversing the barrios of Mexico city is much different. I guess in some way you can compare it to San Francisco, Chicago or Los Angeles – there is quality work to be found. The city differs from all mentioned in that it appears to be young when it comes to street art by having a small group of participants.”

“I was hosted by both MUMUTT Arte and Museo del Juguete Antiguo Mexico, who are both responsible for providing concrete canvases in Mexico City for artist such as ROA, M-City, Pixel Pancho, and fresh stuff from the locals like Saner, Sego and the MOZ crew. Mexico City DF has the most museums in the world and MUMUTT and Museo del Juguete are largely responsible for adding street art to the vast archive of amazing work. They escorted me around to locations they provided for the above artists – It is evident that everyone brought their A-game. The weathered concrete walls made wonderful surfaces for imagery such as Dronz & Koko’s character, offering hallucinatory candy at the toy museum to Ben Eine’s work that speaks about class issues on a worksite for a future mall.”