Alejandro García Contreras was born in Tapachula, Chiapas, and came of age in that southern Mexican state where the Zapatista revolutionaries have enduring influence. Raised by a political organizer father, and a mother who worked to take care of the family and foster his artistic leanings, Contreras grew up in a world rife with dubbed cartoons and Catholicism’s lingering dogmas. He was drawn to plastic action figures as a respite from the chore of church. But these toys, too, seemed shaped by religious stories of good and evil, which also permeated the television he watched and the concrete, ceramic, and plasticine toys he began making in grade school.

This fall, Pioneer Works was honored to host Contreras’ first institutional show, ¿Quién no ha intentado convertir una piedra en un recuerdo?, or Who hasn't tried to turn a stone into a memory?. Inspired by the notion of an archaeological site left behind by some ancient civilization, Alejandro spent two months in the residency program leading up to the exhibition. Casting concrete and creating nearly the entire installation on site at Pioneer Works, he created a show that blends his ceramic practice with concrete and experimental video to construct portals, mirrors, and black holes that mix age-old symbols with icons of popular culture.

The artist first met our founding artistic director, Gabriel Florenz, in 2021, in Guadalajara, where Contreras is now based. Florenz also hails from Mexico, where his own youth was marked by the country’s syncretism of the sacred and profane. He was instantly smitten with Contreras’ eclectic syntheses of these themes, and the two have remained close since. Contreras has been working out of his PW studio throughout the show’s run, but as his time in Red Hook comes to a close, he sat down with Florenz to discuss his life, work, and influences. ¿Quién no ha intentado convertir una piedra en un recuerdo? is on view until December 15th.

–The Editors

Do you remember the first time you thought you wanted to be an artist, or did you just want to make things?

I was copying comic books, but my real obsession was making action figures. That was my dream. I had Ninja Turtles toys, and I was really obsessed with trying to understand the sculpting process of the figures. And for me it was like, "Oh my God, I would love to make toys."

Many years later, I met a person who was actually working for Disney, making toys, and they told me, "You will fucking hate this job because you’ll be making Frozen action figures. It's not as fun as you think."

Right. It's all very restricted. You have to just manufacture something as if you're a machine.

Yeah. I’ve always loved sculpting things with clay. I think ceramics is the best way to develop what I have in my brain. It's so easy. I feel like I'm a 3D printing machine.

But as a kid I was using plasticine, because it was cheap and the only material I had access to. I remember playing with plasticine in kindergarten and making the figures from the cartoons I was watching—Mazinger Zeta, He-man, the ThunderCats and their castle. Pretty cheesy. I was also drawing dinosaurs, a lot of dinosaurs. My dream as a kid was to be a paleontologist.

When I was 12 or 13 years old, I met this very talented person in Tapachula, where I’m from. He’s one of the best sculpting artists I’ve ever known. He taught me some tricks with this material. He was making portraits of Michael Jordan with perfect anatomy, perfect aliens, the Predator and the Terminator. I asked him to teach me, and he was in the midst of a very bad economic moment in his family, so I bought some of his Star Wars figures. I still have his collection. He came to my home for maybe six or seven sessions, and that’s how I learned how to build some figures. He was so talented, but he never became an artist. So for me, that was why I couldn’t stay. The place was beautiful, incredible. But if you had other interests, it felt impossible to grow. When I was a teen, I moved from Tapachula to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of Chiapas.

And was Catholicism a big part of your upbringing?

Yeah. Catholicism is so deep in Mexico, and I was going to a Catholic school, so there was nowhere to hide. But it was funny because I was a fan of a cartoon called the Caballero del Zodiaco, the Knights of the Zodiac. And my Mama would negotiate with me: "If you don’t go to church, there will be no Knights of the Zodiac." I would go to church thinking, “Fuck this shit. I just need to be here so I can watch my cartoons.”

I never went back to church, so maybe it was not a good negotiation.

But you never had any kind of passion for the church or for God. It wasn't something that seduced you as a kid.

I think the religious imagination was very strange to me. Growing up, there was a big connection with the catholic Easter traditions, but it was more tied to the Central American tradition.

Viacruxis was a short documentary you made with Hazel Hill McCarthy III. It’s centered on a ceremony that reenacts the path Jesus took in Jerusalem to be crucified, but it’s become a more syncretic festival that incorporates all sorts of contemporary and pop cultural references. Do you think this follows a general trajectory of how Catholicism has evolved in Mexico?

In my region, the real syncretism happened in the last 30 years, because many people from these little towns came to the U.S. to make money and send it home. Many of them returned obsessed with American pop culture. So now you’ll see Transformers, Captain America, Mickey Mouse in street festivals—because this is what they bring back. But that region of Chiapas is not even connected with a big Indigenous tradition.

So there's this other layer of a capitalist symbology that's influencing these different traditions. For you, there was the Catholic Church but more importantly there was television—Spider-Man and Batman and Wonder Woman. Those were your myths, your universe. And then at 20 you left the capital of Chiapas for Bellas Artes in Mexico City. But you didn’t get in at first.

Not in the first year, because I was extremely political. Coming from Chiapas, it was easy to feel connected to Zaptisimo, an anticapitalist movement in Chiapas from the ’90s that rebelled against the government because of widespread poverty. It was one of the first social revolutions with access to the internet, and I grew up in the middle of all of it. Chiapas has always been one of the most rebellious regions in Mexico. Now, in Chamula—the center of Chiapas—the Mexican law doesn't work. They aren’t exactly autonomous, but they do whatever they want.

So you came to Mexico City with a pretty revolutionary, burning spirit.

My father was working as an organizer with the Confederación Nacional Campesina, which is the national confederacy of farmers. He was the first person in his family to go to university—he went to Mexico City to become a lawyer—but he never practiced law. He jumped into politics so I had this connection to poverty through him. He showed me that life can be extremely hard, so I had kind of a rechazo, a distaste for my rich friends. I thought, “If you are rich, you're a bad person.”

My mother was different, though. She was taking care of the kids, and played a huge part in how I was able to develop as an artist. She gave me plasticine and sent me to classes, buying colors for my drawings. Her dream was to be an artist, but that never happened.

So you came to Bellas Artes but you didn’t actually get into the school. They didn't want you there. You were too much of a rebel.

Yeah, I was too much of a rebel. And I was coming from Chiapas, and it's already a thing in Mexico, where people are like, "Be careful with those people. Those guys are fucking crazy."

And so then you tried again to get in the next year?

I tried again. A teacher I met in Tuxtla Gutiérrez who taught at the Bellas Artes, Carla Rippey—one of the best graphic artists in Mexico—told me, "Don't go back to Chiapas. Figure out how to stay here, and you can come every day to my class as a listener and just work here."

She saw something in me. She didn’t get me in, but she pushed me, and told me how to present myself in the next test. And so the following year, when they asked, "Are you from Chiapas?" I said, "Yes." "Do you have a place to live here?" "Yes." "Do you want a revolution?" "No."

So she guided you. Do you remember the early influences of when you came to Bellas Artes? Were you looking at a lot of the Mexican muralists and learning about the Mexican tradition?

I started with Mexican art because I'd never seen anything from before the ’60s. Muralism was not really something that touched me. But in the ’60s there was a big movement in Mexico called La Ruptura, the breakup—this separation from muralism and the start of a new modern art from José Luis Cuevas, Lilia Carrillo, Manuel Felguerez. I started painting abstract work.

Living in the city, I could go to concerts, libraries, museums, and the Chopo market—the largest market of rock and music and goth objects in the world. At the time it felt like a free place for rebels, anarchists, and punks. I found incredible music and movies. All my life I had wanted to see things like Nosferatu or Metropolis, but it was impossible in Chiapas—no internet. So I spent one year watching two or three movies per day.

It was a moment of building out my connection to culture. But contemporary art never was something that really attracted me, honestly.

Did that change later?

For many years, I felt lost because in Mexico, contemporary art was strongly related to conceptualism and minimalism and not figurative art. Many of my teachers suggested that I wasn’t learning anything in art school because I wasn’t taking modernism seriously and was only interested in figurative stuff.

I was really like, "I don't give a fuck about Derrida or Foucault because it doesn't belong to me. I'm from Chiapas. I'm not fucking French." And in the art school, they were really into that European, North American style.

What were you making at the time in school?

I was making what I’m making now. I drew and made prints on metal, full of pop cultural references and psychotropic things. I had always worked with plasticine, but in Mexico City I could get 50 kilos of porcelain for $25. My first ceramics project was the three dead Ramones in heaven.

I started taking LSD, which led to a big explosion in my brain. I thought I’d go crazy if I didn’t get it out through my work. I had a bad trip where I felt I was going to hell, and I had a vision of talking to the devil. He was asking me, "What is your purpose in life?" And I was terrified. I started reading about LSD through Albert Hoffman and Aldous Huxley, which helped me understand it as a projection of my inner psychology because of my Catholic background.

But in this hallucination, the devil was probing you, asking, “What the hell are you doing here?"

Yeah. I went to hell. I saw fucking weird shit. I saw David Bowie jumping around and The Ramones having a massive orgy. And this Baphomet figure in the middle with ten women touching his legs on a carpet full of blood. It looked like a cheap heavy metal album cover. All these images are still in my head, like pillars of gold.

But I understand it all better now. The devil was explaining that I didn’t need to be so conflicted about my soul being good or bad. I could embrace both sides and ask God to hold me.

Was this breakthrough responsible for the occultism and mythology that’s in your work now?

No, that shift happened earlier, in childhood. My grandfather, my mom's dad, was very into esotericism and occultism. He had a store selling crystals, reading tarot and coffee grounds, and my mom read tarot, too.

My grandfather visited Chiapas when I was 5 years old. He gave me a Tetragrammaton, which is an important symbol in esotericism—a pentagram with a body in the middle, with small symbols surrounding it—a very powerful talisman for good things. The next time I went to visit him, he gave me an encyclopedia of the occult. I was maybe 6 years old, so just learning to read, but the images were strong. It's almost 1,000 pages, about the Loch Ness Monster, the jetty, the dinosaurs, vampirism and lycanthropy, the Incas, Egyptian mummies, all that shit. I immediately connected with that stuff.

So that was really coming up in your work from the start. When you were that young, did you believe in those monsters and myths?

Definitely. The book has been almost a guide in my life. Next year I’ll be doing an exhibition in a small museum in Paris with Bolesław Biegas. He's a nineteenth century artist from Polanie. The first time I saw one of his paintings was in this book, and it took me a long time to find the real paintings in person. And now I'm doing a show with his work.

So, to go back to your trajectory: What brought you from Mexico City to Guadalajara?

I stayed in Mexico City for 10 years with the school to try and develop my career. I went briefly to Guadalajara in 2007 because I started working with a gallery in Mexico City. At that moment, Proyectos Monclova was run by José Garcia, and we were the same age, maybe 24 or 25. He saw my ceramics and invited me to do a show. He told me, "Hey, we need to go to Guadalajara. There's this place called Cerámica Suro, and you could produce bigger pieces there."

So I went to Guadalajara and I made a massive ceramic dune worm that was three meters long. But I was so scared of rich people, so I thought, “This guy wants to fuck me.” I returned to Mexico City, where I stayed until 2015. And then I moved to Chiapas.

And why did you leave Mexico City for Chiapas? I mean, at that point you were making art like crazy. You knew people there and then you decided to go home.

I was extremely depressed and disappointed in the contemporary art scene. At the time, a curator from abroad had just moved to Mexico City, and everybody was obsessed with him. He just dropped in and said, "You don't know who the artists are here. I'm going to tell you who they are." It seemed like there was no way to jump from Mexico if he didn’t decide to show your work out of the country or in the other galleries. I was so angry.

And in the end, I was right. He left the city. I couldn’t sell my work for enough money—though when I was 24, I won a huge prize in Mexico and they gave me $10,000, which I saved and lived on for a while.

I gave the money to my grandma in Chiapas. She would lend it and then send me the interest.

So your grandma was your banker. Were you making things in Chiapas, or did you leave art for a bit?

I also moved there because I fell in love with this incredible French artist, and we didn't have money or a place to live. So we decided to go back to Chiapas to live in my parents’ cabin and build a residency program. She asked for money from the French government, and we ran that project for four years, inviting artists from around the world with no money to come stay. That's when I started with concrete.

There was no kiln, and I was frustrated because I couldn’t do ceramics. One of my close friends had a concrete company, so I got a bunch of it for free and I was working with it in my garden.

You made a portal for your exhibition here, based on a portal you made in that garden.

It's funny because it took me five years to make it in Chiapas. Here, I made it in one month. In a way, I brought part of my home to New York.

What made you leave Chiapas?

The pandemic. My relationship ended, and my partner went back to France. I was alone. I couldn’t do the residency, because nobody was traveling. I was really depressed, and seriously thinking about how to hang myself in the house.

Your girl's gone; it's all over. Our world doesn't love you.

And then my friend, Rigo Campuzano, who runs a gallery in Guadalajara, saw my depression and said, "You have two options. You take a plane to Guadalajara, or I’ll pick you up. But you are not staying here." We ended up creating a crew show in Guadalajara together. And then, after three months, he told me, "You don't need to go back to Chiapas. You can use the factory as a studio and continue exploring ceramics." So I just packed my things and moved.

You obviously had a place to make work there, but did you get involved with that community of artists? Did you like that art scene more than the one in Mexico City?

I’d already met many people in Guadalajara when I got there. All of my friends had wanted me to move there for a long time. They had repeatedly told me, “Come here, come here,” but I didn't believe them.

When you are from Chiapas and live in a centralized country, you think the only way to become successful is to go to the capital. But I was deeply wrong. I will never go back to Mexico City, honestly.

I started selling small works, and creating my own market until I could sell larger pieces. And then I realized, "This is where I need to be."

So it was really the first time you felt accepted and supported in the art world at all.

Yes. It was also the first time that I decided to really explore erotic subjects in my work.

Had you been scared to go there before?

I was really scared. I spent so much time in the factory hiding because I thought people would think, “What the fuck is up with the Chiapaneco? He’s a pervert.” But then it was totally the opposite. When I started exploring sexuality, the people who got closest to my work were women. And that's when I started to gain confidence in exploring these feminine, erotic subjects. Seeing that women were experiencing my work as more natural than aggressive, I started to feel more free. And others were responding to it, too.

Yeah. You're referencing a lot of different kinds of eroticism from a wide range periods—there’s some medieval and Catholic iconography, and then there’s also a lot of anime.

Yes, yes. I grew up with anime as well as comics. Anime started to be sold in Mexico in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s because the Japanese cartoons were cheaper for the Latin American TV companies than CBS or whatever. The translation was happening in Chile. So I was watching all of this Japanese animation, translated by Chileans. I watched a lot of Mazinger, Zeta, Candy Candy, Sailor Moon.

And now when you show your work, do you ever still feel a little bit perverse, or worried you’ll be judged?

It depends on where it's displayed, and the baggage and background of the viewer. Some people can experience it as aggressive, but I no longer feel like that’s my problem. If someone has a bad perception of my work, it’s often because they have a very bad perception of sexuality. And the funny thing is, the people who get more annoyed are usually men. I think they feel they cannot express themselves because they’ll be judged, or will do it in improper ways.

Interesting. I love how you explore sexual perversions. There are so many treasures in your work, and that’s what immediately struck me. Jabba the Hutt exists along a Death Star pipe, but then that pipe turns into a woman, or into a funerary [scene]. There are mirrors, portals, and black holes. And it all connects to your own very wide esoteric views.

I love thinking about the myths that we’re living in now, and I love how you conflate time periods and fold in fantasy. There's a lot of syncretism that I grew up with in Mexico in how God and the devil merged with this idea of the dark side. Who is Batman? Who is Spider-Man? Who is a hero?

Who is a villain?

Yeah. I love how you mix symbologies, how you’re a child of mythology, occultism, magic and capitalism. You’re against the art world, against notions of what art is supposed to focus on, and instead you like universal symbols that everyone can connect with.

I think it's a way to democratize language. So many people who come through the exhibition start talking about their childhoods, their favorite characters and the costumes they wore as kids. So there's a beautiful way to activate these emotional things, these memories. These small moments help create honest connections between people.

My grandma never went to school. She can’t even read. And it's so beautiful that every time I show her something I’ve made, she understands and appreciates it. She loves alien movies, so she loves my alien figures. I like to create art that can be read on many different layers. You don't need to be an ultra-smart or educated person, with a background knowledge of contemporary art, to be touched by these things. ♦