DALTON GATA

Gata’s creatures appear not only aware, but defiant of that tangled knot—what Sylvia Wynter describes as the ‘symbolic code of life/death’—from which the highly surveilled, lethal, and arbitrary borders that justify sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and speciesism emerge. Gata’s beings understand this perfectly, and luckily, they know a couple tricks: they shimmy a little and suddenly the knot comes loose, they’re free, gazing optimistically at a new horizon, or confronting the viewer with a smile, “So when are you going to let go?” His beasts beckon us to their hybrid confines, their overlapping categories confront us with the monstrous that is simultaneously beautiful.

The chimeras pose—they know they are being watched, professionally lit. They’re used to the judgmental, envious gaze of the normative eye, and they even expect it: they adorn and arrange themselves to welcome it. They’re the stars of their own mythological fashion editorial. They embody that photographic, editorial quality in Gata’s painterly eye: the defiant stare of his subjects, the sharpness and the hyper-saturated colors align more with the poetic yet revindicating fashion imagery of Tyler Mitchell, Deana Lawson, or Omar Victor Diop, than with the art historical, white, canon.

It’s in that against-the-grain spirit that the party and its dislocations become important as well—a break for mutual celebration, for the euphoria of escapism and pleasure, of postponing the rigor of existence. And perhaps because occasional liberation doesn’t guarantee utopia, the party here is not a placeholder for the promised land: it involves chaos, sweat, pleasure, frenzy, and risk. In Gata’s creation, ruin appears as the counterpart to fantasy: his still lifes wear lively drag, they are memento mori of Caribbean exuberance. It’s a lavish, island ruin—surrounded by the sea’s corrosive breeze, by humidity that eats away at yellowing walls, by flesh shining with salty sweat.

These works also aim to evoke an itinerant existence, the ordinary but no less heavy burdens of constant relocation, of always carrying one’s own instability, even if it goes hand in hand with the will to beautify one’s surroundings, to give a quick “manita de gato” (a touch-up) to what we know is not our own—the vulnerable beauty one snatches from that which doesn’t seem willing to cooperate. Gata sublimates his lived experience in these fantastic compositions—within them are traces of his intimacy, of his scrolling, of his lovers, his recent past, the friendships and loved ones that rescued his boat from the high seas of precarity, that harbored his imagination. They are migrant beings, revelers, inhabitants of a kitsch domesticity—beasts of the night, of the beach, and of the future.

The beast-works accompany one another—they make up their own world: more fabulous, more glamorous, one day maybe possible.

— Gaby Cepeda

Courtesy of OMR, Mexico City.