Uber: Déjame entrar

One of the main characteristics of vampires is that they are inevitably seductive. It’s not that their victims simply want to be butchered, but they are often attracted to their apparent youth, their power, their straightforward existence, they carry on extracting life and living forever. Even Marx, a very Gothic writer, couldn’t help himself from using the vampire metaphor a few times in Das Kapital, in which ‘capital is dead labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ —  the bourgeoisie and its gargantuan lust for exploitation is a blood-sucking curse. 

For Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, our Uber of today is just the latest iteration of that cursed thirst, another manifestation of the group of abstractions that materially rule over our lives. Uber represents the epitome of the gig-economy logic, in which our every free moment, our very precariousness is sold back to us as an opportunity for pecuniary advancement. Uber simply makes us freer, we’re working smarter by subjecting ourselves, our bodies and our times to its miserable logic. It is always a good time to be making some pesos! Once upon a time it was religion, God was the unquestionable logic — one could say that before we were chasing dollars we were after God’s grace, his mercy. The philosopher Sylvia Wynter very keenly names the radical transformation from the medieval homo religiosus, whose entire reason for existence was God’s will, to the homo oeconomicus of today, centered around the all-powerful Capital: it has now fully sunk its teeth in our supple necks and mesmerized us into believing it is the only way, the single most efficient and merit-worthy way of living.

For this show, Frieda delivers this material-historical critique in lavish form, here is everything anyone could ever want from a painting: a sweeping Gothic narrative, melodramatic posing, sexual tension, glittery blood, evil alien ships, even cherubs. The series is inspired by Paolo Veronese, recognized for being one of the Three Venetian Colorists alongside Titian and Tintoretto. When painting his massive, slightly-heretic compositions, Veronese would frequently use this trick of not stopping at the frame, a cherub would peek from a window, only a third of their chubby body visible; or they would stand at Saint Helena’s feet in a corner, struggling off the frame with a cross. This had the point of making the plane appear larger, not merely reduced to what was in it, and through our mental completion, we could read it as much more expansive. 

This visual trickery served Frieda, as in her own contemporary fable she too is representing powers beyond our comprehension, what Mark Fisher once called the ‘thanatophoric fatalism’ of capital, our yearning for entropy in the form of our endless desire tipping over any kind of equilibrium — the consumption that fuels capital and its incessant transformations, adaptations, annihilations. And what better encapsulates this deathly desire today than our love for cars? We know they’re terrible for us, and yet they continue to occupy a unique place within our symbolic reality. The car is both capitalism’s preternatural vehicle, a mechanism for the constant manipulation of our understanding of time/space and also a contradictory hybrid of exteriority and interiority: what Frieda calls ‘the psychological space of capitalism’. 

At the peak of her saga this machinic-capital reveals itself as a Landian artifact, an alien ship inoculating us with its dystopian rationale, a mechanism of despair and de-subjectivization, that invades our minds and robs us from imagining a future. And that has been the target of Frieda’s counter-strike all along: If paintings are epistemological technology, one of the many tools used by Western tradition to colonize and re-write histories, then Frieda’s works are about that ideological occidental machinery being penetrated and vandalized by organically transmitted skills.  Her goal is to destabilize, to dislocate, to accelerate into chaotic atomization, seeking the kind of desire that doesn’t fuel annihilation.

– Gaby Cepeda

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Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (1988. Mexico City, MX) is an artist who uses her agency to break the pre-established boundaries of art history and to explore the performative act of painting from a philosophical and political standpoint. To activate the theatrical power of painting, she uses both installation elements and embroidery, a practice that has been inherited by women throughout Mexican history. Frieda Toranzo evokes this tradition by asking women in her family to embroider the drawn outlines on the canvas in their own style, adding a layer of complexity to her work. Along with these elements, she merges unusual scenarios with atypical motifs to materialize the future that she foresees as a queer utopia, in which identity, cultural hybridity, and post-colonial thinking have thrived. Her practical, critical, and academic influences are based on women painters and a non-hegemonical discourse, which makes her work a platform to discuss capitalism, power, and identity.

Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at Modern Art Oxford opening March 2024, Oxford, UK. She is guest artist of the Venice Biennale Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, opening April 2024.. Toranzo studied her Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts at HfBK Hochschule Für Bildende Künste in 2017 and a Masters in Fine Arts, during 2019 at HfBK Hochschule Für Bildende Künste, both in Hamburg, Germany.

Her most recent solo exhibitions include Heart Core, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, DE, (2023); Autonomous Drive, MoMA PS1, New York, US (2023); The Perpetual Sense of Redness, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, USA (2021); Fantasies of Autonomy, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2019); Deep Adaptation, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, DE (2019); Autofelatio, High Art, Paris, FR (2018); Choque Cultural, Lulu, Mexico City, MX (2018) and Die Windschutzscheibe, Reena Spaulings, New York, US (2017).

Recent group shows include La revolución se bajó del caballo y el caballo del muro. De nuevos muralismos y otras heterodoxias, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City, MX (2023); Junkyard of Dreams, Bortolami, New York, US (2023); Concrete Spiritual, Morán Morán, Los Angeles, US (2022); Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Nicodim, New York, US 2022); what do you see, you people, gazing at me, Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK (2021); Nuestrxs Putxs, Human Resources, Los Angeles, US (2021); NVG Triennial, The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, AU (2021); En llamas, Llano, Mexico City, MX (2021); De Por Vida, Company Gallery, New York, US; Ways of living #2, NICO Gallery presented by Arcadia Missa, Bari, IT (2021) and Page (NYC), Petzel, New York, USA.

Yet, her work has been on view in Berlin, DE; Paris, FR; New York, USA; Baltimore, USA; London, UK; Mexico City, MX; Los Angeles, USA; Melbourne, AU; Bari, IT; Metz, FR; Gateshead, UK; Warsaw, PL; Stockholm, SE; Buenos Aires, AR; Milan, IT; Vienna, AT; Hamburg, DE and Schwerin, DE.

Her work is part of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (US); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (AU); Kadist Foundation, Paris (FR) and San Francisco (US); Helaba Bank Collection, Frankfurt (DE); and Bundeskunstsammlung Deutschland (German National Art Collection), Bonn (DE).