There Will Be Better Days

Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, France, 2009.

Deeply fascinated by the exploration of Mexican current popular culture, Eduardo Sarabia has focused this new project on the collision between urban and natural environments. Needless to say, in Mexico, one of the main links that connect these two separate worlds is violence: drug-related hit men running free on the streets, committing bloody public executions, almost all of which find regular coverage by some of the many yellow journalism magazines specialized in the subject. While charred, mutilated, riddled bodies have become everyday usual images on newsstands, Mexican “spectacle-lization” of blood and crime has grown to unprecedented degrees. Once celebrated by the people, these new extremes have opened new and contradictory perspectives. Curiously, many of the most brutal photographs depicting dead bodies show natural settings: beautiful prairies, dense jungles, lakes, mountains and idyllic riversides serve as a contrasting backdrop to such horror. Recently, Sarabia’s attention was caught by an apparently innocent image found on a newspaper: a group of five middle-sized Styrofoam beer coolers, clumsily wrapped with brown packing tape, left abandoned underneath a striking Ceiba tree. The caption next to the image, though, informed him that those coolers, branded with the logotype of a very popular Mexican convenience store, where the containers of five beheaded remains of drug dealers, accompanying threat notes and all.

 For this exhibition, Eduardo Sarabia works give us an insight to the innocent and decorative side of fear.