Eduardo Sarabia, Four Minutes of Darkness at OMR, Mexico City

Mermaids, crows, narc-culture tropes, and the forthcoming total eclipse of the sun. It’s not an immediately self-evident grouping but in Four Minutes of Darkness, Eduardo Sarabia’s inaugural show at OMR, it becomes part of a constellation of symbols that makes up the artist’s singularly eclectic universe. Born in Los Angeles to Mexican parents, Sarabia moved to Mexico as an adult. Underlying his acerbic visual vocabulary is a methodical exploration of identity – a distillation of histories and mythologies both personal and collective.

On the first floor of the gallery, Sarabia installed a chapel-like structure enveloped by a mural of acid green vines. Its stained glass ceiling casts a soft, kaleidoscopic glow over a fountain from which a mermaid coyly emerges. The installation plays with elements of kitsch in the Mexican architectural and pop culture vernaculars – in the Los Angeles neighborhood where Sarabia grew up, residents painted vines, flowers, and branches on the facades of their homes to deter graffiti taggers.

Sarabia’s ceramic works are inspired by Mexican blue and white talavera ceramics, a traditional craft that he subverts by painting decidedly illicit—and subtly political—subjects on the pieces and setting them on top of wooden crates emblazoned with reimagined logos of Mexican companies. It is a pointed allusion to the country’s black market economy (the falluca), which often operates under the tacit auspices of legitimate business, and the social and cultural entanglements that arise as a result. The exhibition is the second in a trilogy dedicated to the four-minute total eclipse of the sun that will take place on April 8th, 2024, concluding with a show at the Museo de Arte de Mazatlán, Sinaloa in April.

On view until April 13th, 2024.

OMR

Cordoba 100

Roma Norte,

Mexico City

Text by Anfisa Vrubel, Images by Ramiro Chaves