Sin título 2
Francisco Toledo
Untitled 2
In 2014, Francisco Toledo worked in the red ceramics studio run by Claudio Jerónimo López, in San Agustín Etla, Oaxaca, to produce a series alluding to the widespread violence across Mexico and the world in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Most of the pieces were shown in the exhibit Duelo [Grief, 2015–2016] at Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno, which accentuated the drama of the work itself with stark lighting and high contrasts.
The exhibition made a profound impact, both due to the virtuosity of the work and to Toledo’s expression of collective mourning for the hundreds of thousands of murdered and disappeared people in Mexico.
The decoration of the pieces is a historic accounting: accumulations of bodily fragments of animals and humans; figures in pain, many without eyes; and the combination of bones, cord, tape, and body bags that have become the vocabulary of executions in this country.
Sin título 2 is among the most austere and purist urns in the series. It stands out for the clay’s precise emulation of roughly textured wicker and string; a cross on the lid is the sole symbolic gesture. The careful color-dispersion expresses Toledo’s obsession with the physical truth of his object. This piece unites his intent to reconcile historical and ethical belonging with the way in which his art makes demands of material and technique as the imprint of a complex cultural history.
FRANCISCO TOLEDO (1940–2019)
Sin título 2, 2015
Untitled 2
High-temperature ceramic
Acquisition, 2018
