Frieda Toranzo Jaeger wants to go for a ride. Don’t worry if your hands are too busy with – uh – other things to take the wheel. Her painted vehicles drive themselves. All you need to do is sit back and enjoy.
From the ceiling of Modern Art Oxford dangles a vast double-sided heart. Its facetted surface is painted with machine details, rendered in femme pink on one side, forest green on the other. The pink and green hearts are held together with bows, while a break down the centre of each is secured with corset lacing and harness straps. Titled, optimistically, Open Your Heart Because Everything Will Change (2023) it carries fetishistic frisson – the shape of love, dressed in the visual language of sex.
Toranzo Jaeger’s work wilfully resists categorisation – she is a painter, but the canvases in A Future in the Light of Darkness are often shaped and linked to form freestanding or free-hanging objects. Their surfaces are embellished with faint trappings of carnival – glitter and pearls. Rich embroidery glides across them, sometimes framing an image, sometimes creeping through it, sometimes hovering on the surface. Long fringes trail like trim on a shawl.
Dashboards and car interiors place us in a variety of vehicles. Create to Destroy, Destroy to Create/ On Taste and Poetry, Fuego (2019) hovers over the cab of a hot-rod convertible, its seats and gear stick trimmed with flames. Meanwhile, real flames can be seen raging in the rear-view and wing mirrors. Has this car driven away from a natural disaster? It’s been here for some time – vines and other leafy plants are already intruding, flanked by fruiting nopal cactuses. The flora is stitched into the canvas, invading the surface of the painting just as the plants in the picture (the indigenous natural environment) are invading the cab of the car (a zone of manufactured luxury and artifice).
This is an exhibition full of territorial incursions and pushbacks. Based in Mexico City, Toranzo Jaeger is sensitive to the use of art by Spanish colonisers in the 16th century and beyond. “Art” was European, whereas the cultural products of indigenous peoples were “craft”. Her hinged paintings make direct reference to the altarpieces carried by missionaries: multipanelled works that were easy to transport. Where the altarpieces offered the Indigenous peoples of Mexico a vision of the sacred that was populated by white Europeans in a Holy Land on the other side of the world, Toranzo Jaeger’s hinged paintings take us to outer space, or a post-apocalyptic near future.
For New Futures We Need New Beginnings (2022) is a six-sided tower, the upper panels jutting out like gullwing car doors. The lower part of the work is painted in the sleek silver-grey that is habitually described as futuristic, but is the precise aesthetic of a contemporary MacBook Air. We find ourselves in the interior of a spacecraft – a dark sky sparkles with the galaxy spread out before us. It is decorated with artworks and plants, all of which offer new beginnings, of a kind. A beautifully embroidered potato plant (native to Central America) floats ready to sustain life on another planet. A copy of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s diptych Adam and Eve (1528) has been repainted to feature two Eves – a queer origin story on which to build. Cranach’s Judith appears naked, with the head of an embroidered sunflower in place of the head of Holofernes, and her sword on the neighbouring panel transformed into a brightly coloured weapon worthy of a fantasy game.
Car culture has been fuelled in equal parts by testosterone and gasoline, in turn inspiring some great feminist art – think of Judy Chicago’s brightly airbrushed Hoods of the mid 1960s. Like her queer repainting of works by Cranach, Hieronymus Bosch and Hans Memling, Toranzo Jaeger’s appropriation of car culture feels knowing, subversive and celebratory rather than satirical. People make out in the back seats. The dashboards carry paintings by Hilma af Klint and Georgia O’Keeffe. These vehicles are emblems of liberty.
It is not only European art of the colonial era that gets picked up and reworked – Toranzo Jaeger also has the macho frog-prince of Mexican art in her sights. In the 1940s Diego Rivera painted a sequence of Indigenous Mexican women selling huge armfuls of fleshy calla lilies, most seen from behind. Here, there is a sense of imminent retaliation on the part of the silent faceless women: two of Toranzo Jaeger’s paintings feature arms thrusting through the window of a car we’re positioned in, throwing calla lilies back at us. Rivera’s legacy, too, is being repainted.
There is a flaming ferocity to Toranzo Jaeger’s work, an enticing blend of lush surfaces and dynamic forms underpinned by a love-hate fascination with 16th-century art. She drives hard, but wherever she’s heading, there’s pleasure to be had along the way.
• Frieda Toranzo Jaeger: A Future in the Light of Darkness is at Modern Art Oxford until 26 May 2024
