Graphic Cabinet:
The exhibition entitled Mexicanos en el Espacio, by artist Bernardo Fernández (AKA Bef) is presented at the Graphic Cabinet. The exhibition includes a series of recent sketches and other works for several comics (El Soñador and BROOM!). They contain stories in which real and imaginary characters share scene and plot. The storyline – in the case of BROOM! – can be altered  to achieve different endings. There is also a sound animation in which Bef proposes a preposterous trip to the Moon by two Mexican astronauts. This piece was inspired, in part, by the research undertaken for the exhibition De la Tierra a la Luna (From the Earth to the Moon).

Mexicanos en el Espacio (Mexicans in Space)
The end of the world happened yesterday but no one noticed. Today, every one  woke up for work looking forward to their quincena (biweekly salary payment). Everyone except for Bef, who has known for a while now that the future may only be contemplated with nostalgia. This thinking allows him to leap from one dimension into another, as his astronauts bound from  asteroid to asteroid. While he had been a writer yesterday, today Bef is a graphic artist, and tomorrow he will become a designer. He creates cartoons whose fate end in on the white walls of a museum. This is Twentieth Century alchemy:  The written word became the image; then the image became the written word. In the midst of these, there is a catalyzer: trash culture that is “transmogrified” (according to Calvin) into gold. There, in the midst of the trash, is our reality; our darkest fears and our most cherished hopes. This is one of the advantages of knowing that our world has ceased to exist. Boundaries among genres are erased and reality loses consistency. Past and future play Russian roulette, while the present expands ad infinitum.

Narrative and iconography become entangled in an unsolvable jigsaw puzzle and, with no discernable way out, they enter in a torrid and lasting romance. Memetic promiscuity, metaphysical crimes, and mediatic virologies: Which took place first? Have we destroyed our planet and gone out in search of another? Were we attacked first by the monster with tentacles and we then took over the spaceship? A solitary robot walks across the deserted surface of a planet lost in space. We all know Hermétiko was the first to land on the Moon. We also understand that success and fame are awarded not to those who go far, but to those who manage to return. Rendering the images with red, black, and green and using thick, rationed, and expressive lines, Bef relates to us the hopes for a future that never arrived; but one that – thanks to his expressive forcefulness and effectiveness – is projected toward eternity as evidence that prior to the end of the world, we shared noble feelings and an adventurous spirit. There is no beginning and no end. Bef’s “semiotic phantoms” – as William Gibson would term them – are dangerous because of their   harmless appearance. Their status as representations of public and political dreams confers upon them a materiality that defeats our individual dreams.

Thus, the future was written two days ago. The world ended yesterday. Today we are back at work. Bef was the only one to notice. In the meantime, we are observed by dozens of aliens

.ENJOY THE SLIDESHOW OF THE EXHIBITION