Mondongo at Maddox Arts

Mondongo at Maddox Arts

05 December, 2008
by: Katuschka

Argentinian art collective Mondongo consists of Agustina Picasso, Manuel Mendanha, and Juliana Laffitte, and is named after a traditional Latin American tripe stew. It's a fitting name for the self-styled sorcerers and their 'cauldron of ingredients'.

Commes des Garçons' Rei Kawakubo is a big fan of Mondongo's Poundstretcher brand of iconoclasm – their arresting visuals are currently gracing Kawakubo's London store – and now they have a show devoted to their work at Maddox Arts. Kawakubo embodies a fashion concept just the right side of bonkers, and Mondongo occupy similar territory: their work sees plasticine, jelly beans, hair, thread and sausage all been smeared onto canvasses.

This new show rummages in the psychosexual undergrowth of fairy stories and childhood, applying deliberately low-culture, playful aesthetics to common tales. Naïve (and wacky) materials are used to depict scenes of rotting bodies lost in sprawling mediaeval lands (Alone Again), a wolf hungering lustily after Red Riding Hood (Red Riding Hood) and malformed feline human hybrids (Why God, Why Have you Deserted Me).

These work bursts out into the room with vibrant colour and meticulous, almost photorealist rendering. Pictures of their show don't do justice to the overall experience: the off-yoghurt smell of the plasticine, the Stendhal syndrome-inducing detail and the idiosyncrasy of a child's face covered in plasticine breasts (Maman) are pleasures to be seen and smelt in the flesh.

Mondongo's previous show focused on the fleeting consumerism of celebrity, but with a proliferation of ironic celebrity portraits this new exhibition ups the ante. Mondongo are certainly the most vividly imaginative artists currently on the scene, with some works that look like the visualized rantings of a crazy old woman with OCD.

It's easy to buck tradition and choose to use a medium which veers away from the traditional: Nick Georgiou explores the mundane with his newspaper sculptures whilst Anne-Catherine Becker-Echivard does bizarre fish-head art. But you need to understand your limits and employ vast amounts of imagination to be considered a genius, as opposed to an insane shut-in with access to a Tesco.

Mondongo's punk attitude involves wielding their media like an extensive vocabulary, fluffing up their engrossing mysteries with minor details such as an exposed thong on a dead body, wispy fruits made out of thread, or repeated plasticine bosoms (perhaps a little too lovingly rendered). Their use of such a low-fi media has irked some critics who feel that their work is gimmicky but this show proves that Mondongo can carry their approach to exciting new extremes.

The work is the simultaneous discovery and loss of innocence, sanity or life; an ongoing struggle between science and nature, or simply weirdness for weirdness sake. It is ludicrous and childish yet complex and challenging, which is perhaps why they have some critics baffled. However you interpret it though, it is clear that Mondongo are heralded to be the new monarchs of experimental art and their next show will undoubtedly offer up some truly extraordinary imagery. Perhaps sculpted from Weebles and Silly Putty, who can tell? But it definitely won't just be a load of old tripe (sorry…).

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Katuschka