The exhibition El hierro y el tabaco (Iron and Tobacco), by the Mexican artist Noé Martínez (Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico, 1986) is the result of a collaborative project between the LLANO gallery in Mexico City, the CCA Andratx and the Kewenig gallery where the exhibition is taking place. The result of this collaboration will also be a Mexican residency and exhibition by an artist from the gallery here, the Kewenig gallery (and also with the collaboration of the CCA Andratx) which we will discuss when the time comes.

Noé Martínez explores the memory of the colonial past of his native Mexico in order to rethink some essential aspects of conventional historical narrative, developing a critical view of its interpretation. Specifically, he focuses on what affects the Huasteca culture, and from this reflective process he develops a new construction of the present story.

We could classify it as historical-political art, given that its proposals do not aim to be harmless, but rather to alter the minds and memories of the spectators, in order to reconstruct the vision of the past, and therefore base the present on other links and other roots.

This aspect poses for us, as Spaniards who disagree with the lies of the famous black legend that has affected the memory of the Spanish empire, especially with regard to its presence in America, an insurmountable point of disagreement with the program of the proposal.



To begin with, as has been clearly demonstrated in recent studies by independent historians, Spain developed a non-colonial model in America (as did, for example, the British Empire centuries later) , but rather an inclusive one at the administrative level, conceiving the viceroyalties as extensions or provinces of the central State. But let us leave these corrosive fringes and focus on the purely artistic.

The work on display in the exhibition El hierro y el tabaco was executed by the Mexican artist during his artistic residency at the CCA in Andratx in the autumn of 2022. As he is a multidisciplinary artist, who creates both in the visual arts and in writing, photography, audiovisual language and performance, the exhibition includes everything from installations and canvases painted with acrylic primer to two audiovisual pieces, which can be viewed in the atrium part of the former Oratory chapel, a very appropriate place for this, by the way.



As an example, we will mention here the installation that appears as if it were a crack in the floor of the Oratory, and which constitutes, like the rest of the work, a good reference for this type of proposal that requires parallel information about the artist’s purposes, documentation by the viewer given that the conceptual background is almost impossible to decipher without it.

The installation in question is made up of twenty chained iron bars, ten of which contain the letter G and the other ten the letter R. This is the classification nomenclature with which prisoners were referred to in order to mark them as slaves. G for prisoner of war, and R for rescue.

In addition, each of these irons has been intervened with a fragment of a poem by Noé Martínez himself.

Regardless of our disagreement regarding the vision of historical memory, we must acknowledge the extensive career of this artist, who has a very relevant exhibition curriculum (solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Mexico, Brussels…), as well as his inclusion in important collections such as the Rose Museum of Art in Boston or the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

The exhibition El hierro y el tabaco (Iron and Tobacco) , at the Kewenig gallery in Palma, will remain open to the public until May 6.