The material, media and its speeches are inherently embedded with political and cultural values shaped by traditions and ideologies accumulated over time. These values are in turn injected into the production and circulation system of this material and media participation. The choice of materials, the technologies used in creation, and the platforms in which they are spread all have implicit meanings, reflecting the power structures, social norms and cultural biases of their context. At the same time, the dynamic interaction between these embedded values and the audience's interpretive lenses creates a complex and multi-layered system of artistic meaning.
It was Mexican artist Frieda Toranzo Jaeger who investigated the political and philosophical intersection between material, embedded ideology and production systems in her work, which was investigated by her work, and the company quickly attracted attention from the international art world, especially in the latest Venice Contest. Toranzo Jaeger's paintings reject traditional canons and extend the canvas into three-dimensional spaces, and evolved his paintings into well-designed tableaux and cabinet-like structures in which form and content function is connected in series to express philosophical claims.
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The artist told Observer that she told observers after opening with Bortolami in New York: “Content and form are designed to challenge Western concepts of painting and to challenge Canon.” For Toranzo Jaeger, the goal was to allow painting performances. “I wanted to make a painting that couldn’t be reduced to a single image, but rather it would require understanding many images,” she explained.
Every choice the artist makes in her multimedia arrangement stems from intentional political intentions. Through her work, Toranzo Jaeger has made a sharp criticism of the production and circulation systems that define late capitalism, examining how these frameworks affect human behavior and the social structures they shape. At the heart of her practice is the ongoing investigation of what she describes as a “mind space of capitalism.”
To align with this criticism, her work often adopts more traditional male vocabulary from the traditionally more traditional ones of mechanical, automotive engineering and lifestyle culture. These elements are cleverly juxtaposed with anatomical references to present visual similarities between human bodies and artificial vehicle components. But she makes the narrative more complex by integrating exquisite embroidery interventions, a handmade, feminine touch that softens and enriches the surface. For her, masculinity and femininity are not opposites, but interdependent dialectics. “Instead of relying on specific definitions, I think gender is in a permanent state,” she said.
From this it is clear that Frieda Toranzo Jaeger's aesthetic is first and foremost a resilience and self-affirmation, a challenge that challenges fixed ideology and binary definitions. “My resistance and strength stems from anger… Angry anger is due to fascism, genocide, war, inequality, class struggle, to name just a few, I think this inevitably translates into my work.” Her paintings are ultimately an invitation to “control, take power, experience life” in extreme invitations.
What often arises in Toranzo Jaeger's work is tension between humans and machines, which are friction between the driving force of efficiency, productivity and profit, and the impulse toward a widespread, spontaneous creative expression. This tension urgency is in her latest work, which contains a variety of tools. “I explored the integration of 'machine' as ontological agents into the construction of human subjectivity,” she said.
Toranzo Jaeger points out that the large heart-shaped canvas located in the center of the gallery tells us that this work is a stand-in for all machines, not a representative of a particular machine. “It’s a projection screen, a multidimensional site like social media, selfies, stories, AI, and only after being processed through technology, our subjective desires are returned to us.” In her opinion, we are increasingly becoming something that machines filter and feeding it back to us. “Technology will use false information and fake news and require us to slowly deprive us of power based on these virtual beliefs. The painting is about surrendering to the machine and becoming a kind of equipment.” In contrast, the tool paintings throughout the exhibition show the possibility of resistance and repair. “To prevent a crash, you must first believe in the possibility of avoiding it.”
Several works seem to directly address human ambitions to rule the earth, the sky and even the universe. But unlike the tradition of modernism often glorifies technological advances, Toranzo Jaeger's paintings interrogate this myth from the inside out. “This is how our collective psychological space is created by the systems we live in,” she clarified. “By understanding these systems, we regain the agent, but we also understand our limitations.”
Toranzo Jaeger believes that to truly compete with the “psychological space of capitalism”, we must face the legacy of colonialism and its ongoing impact. We also have to ask and answer the question “What is fascism?” With the change of form. Without this understanding, we are still lost in landscapes we do not recognize. In this sense, her paintings are a tool for political prompts – collective criticism of liberation. “They embed questions about where power goes and how it works. Our contemporary reality is particularly complex because it is becoming increasingly difficult to track ideologies because they collapse against each other to prove their capabilities.”
The car is a recurring theme at her work, and it is a metaphor for browsing the life experiences of “queer, people of color, people of color” in a system that rejects them. For Toranzo Jaeger, this car is both the ultimate carrier of capitalism (the mechanism of time/space distortion) and a contradictory hybrid of external and internal nature.
Meanwhile, the artist uses the traditional multi-pypych format to connect her work with a deeper interrogation of religious iconography and ideology, especially in response to the lasting influence of Catholicism in Mexico, a system of belief inherited from the past of the country’s colonies. The three “toolbox” paintings in the show pay direct tribute to the Catholic altars of Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, once used as portable tools for devotion. In Toranzo Jaeger's version, the instruments drawn inside the “altar” become symbols and prompts a much-needed spiritual and critical restoration society, but are still attracted by the supposed progress and self-improvement.
Nevertheless, with the title of the exhibition “Unpersonal Unified Tool” that led Toranzo Jaeger to refuse to use autobiography to prove or anchor her practice. “But invest in universal liberation,” she said. “God was the first concepts created, and the religion, that is, the systems that arise, to make them meaningful.” She continued painting was one of the earliest tools in the education. Her goal was to develop paintings that would have a universal understanding of epistemological values, even if they directly challenged the ideology of those early images.
From this perspective, the connection between Toranzo Jaeger's practice and Mexico's long-standing fresco tradition has become more focused. She believes that murals are one of the most revolutionary art movements of the 20th century. “Why is this? Because it is one of the few movements actually put into its ideology,” she told Observer. “By adopting art outside of museums, galleries and institutions, the artists donated art directly to people. This effectively dismantled or at least bypassed the bourgeois ideology that controls what can be controlled and invisible, and the system prevented all other art movements from affecting the reality of their time.” The artists behind the movement were considered too dangerous, the government was eventually turned away, and the muralist project disappeared. Nevertheless, for Toranzo Jaeger, the legacy of the mural remains a powerful reminder of what art can do, and it is still deeply embedded in her own revolutionary practice.
Ultimately, in the face of pre-established ideology, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s exhibition in Bortolami called for resilience and resistance, invoking a creative expression and critical thinking that could challenge arbitrary value systems and envision a free society. Despite the threat of tech to gradually deprive us of power – VIA misinformation, fake news and pressures surrounding beliefs surrounding narratives, Toranzo Jaeger sells a challenge through a handmade aesthetic, an objection to accelerate erasing power.
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger's “Unpersonal Unification Tool” will last until April 26, 2025 in Bortolami, New York.
