Chivo Fresco (Fresh Goat), curated by Victor Zamudio Taylor, is a group show that highlights young and emerging talent with artists who already have a marked presence in the Mexican and international scene.

A platform that underlines the heterogeneity of practices, the link amongst the artists is their frank and determined if not stubborn stance to experiment -albeit with traditional formal frameworks- in order to fashion an individual language and a conceptual signature.

Taken the its title from a photograph in the exhibition, Chivo Fresco rides the semantic and metaphoric waves associated with title –culinary, scatological, psychological, underworld and subcultural, and sexual, and new, ready-to-go, youthful.

Divided in two nuclei though juxtaposed in the gallery installation, Chivo Fresco underlines the practice of two painters –Will Berry and Agustin Gonzalez- and 5 artists working in a variety of media but all informed by and responding to pop urban global culture – René Castelán Foglia, Patrick Hamilton, Eric Múñoz, José Luis Sánchez Rull.

Berry’s recent body of work deals with light by means of experimenting with different metals as pigments which veil and reveal under-drawings with motifs influenced by Pre-Colombian, architectural and Renaissance patterns; in the show he presents small-scale studies. Informed by the Mexican School, particularly the work of José Clemente Orozco, González’ paintings incorporate his thorough knowledge of the Leipzig School to create strong works that are polyglot in style, from abstract to expressionist.

Urban youth cultures are a laboratory for Sánchez Rull, sources for his surreal-like associative drawings and paintings that propose a neo-punk existentialist view of the world. Castelán Folgia’s photography also dwell in contemporary visual culture, they register and magnify details of the urban landscape, poetic, they lend themselves to an array of readings.

In the tradition of hand-painted Pop, Múñoz presents a series of sculptures that revert to ecology and symbol/brand recognition. Finding discarded paper cups with the logos of fast food and beverage brands –Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Maruchan soups, McDonalds as well as Corona, Indio and Victoria beers, he casts each one in plaster and paints them with their characteristic colors and typography anew.

Hamilton’s oeuvre revolves around the power of images to forge the social imaginary, and their relationship to power and diverse issues engaging representation. In Chivo Fresco he presents key examples of his on-going body intervened postcards. Cut into and patterned geometrically in the spirit of Southern Cone abstraction, the work calls attention to the images that Chilean national culture flaunts as stereotypes –from glaciers and ski resorts to penguins and monumental sculptures from Easter Island.

In the Holiday spirit of giving and generosity to those in need, 20% of the sales of Chivo Fresco benefit the AIDS focused foundation, Mexico Vivo.

With the exception of Hamilton who lives and works in Santiago, Chile, all the artists in Chivo Fresco reside and work in Mexico City.

Independent curator Victor Zamudio Taylor is an art advisor, writer and lecturer. He resides and lives in Mexico City and works for Eugenio Lopez, President of the Jumex Foundation/Collection.