Frieda Toranzo Jaeger. Impersonal Unity Tools

About

The ten new paintings in Toranzo Jaeger’s exhibition are prompts, beckoning us to seek strategies for our collective liberation. Through tableaus of various sizes and shapes, the artist presents a series of seemingly disparate tools and events, drawing connections between static object and unfolding situation. What will occur if we neglect to pick up the sickle, hammer, or chainsaw as commercial planes fall from the sky and the ultra-rich jet into space, leaving in their wake a charred planet? The animating principle here is beyond an epistemological construction of the self, beyond identity, towards collective action: “risk rather than reflection,” as the philosopher Reza Negarestani puts it. Fantasy is as much an instrument as any you find in a toolbox, it is cinder and cement in building material alternatives.

Toranzo Jaeger is celebrated for her lavish modular paintings, often held together by hinges and eyelets. The surfaces of these polyptychs are densely layered with traditional Mexican embroidery and imagery in oil paint, culled from the briefer history of Western fine art. A certain drama unfolds in these scenes, a standoff between tradition and what is stifled under its long shadow. New forms of desire and erotics peek through at every seam in her multipartite works, literally cracking open new potentialities.