Working across sculpture, drawing, and installation, Mexican artist Jorge Satorre weaves complex, subversive narratives around a variety of themes, including labor, value, memory, and desire. As these diverse strands become fruitfully entangled, they create unforeseen meanings and serendipitous synchronicities. The multimedia project Chamarra negra, sudadera gris (Black jacket, gray sweatshirt) (2020), for instance, began as a series of sketches based on written observations of a couple kissing in a Mexico City park, which Satorre conflated with a 17th-century Spanish comedy about a peculiar practice among high-society women that became associated with outdoor sexual liaisons. The drawings, presented at CarrerasMugica gallery in Bilbao, Spain, where Satorre now lives, then evolved into a book and a sculpture exhibition at CRAC Alsace in Altkirch, France, in 2021.
Satorre’s attention to minutiae and alternate perspectives reflects his longstanding interest in microhistory, particularly the ideas of Carlo Ginzburg. Los Negros (The Blacks, 2011)—an elaborate installation of nearly 200 brick sculptures, drawings, stone plates, and roof tiles—drew from Ginzburg’s book The Cheese and the Worms (1976), which examines 16th-century Italian culture through the unorthodox beliefs of an obscure miller named Menocchio. Satorre’s work was the fruit of several visits to the village of Montereale Valcellina, where Menocchio lived and died, condemned to death for heresy.
For Satorre, such gaps in larger systems and official histories open up spaces for compelling dialogues between the physical and the intellectual, beauty and functionality, expressed through the meeting of strong conceptual foundations and material poetry.
Elizabeth Fullerton: Pelusa (Fluff), your 2021 permanent commission at Mexico’s range hood manufacturer ElicaMex, pays tribute to obsolescence and anomalies within the factory’s highly standardized system of production. Rather than a conventional artwork, you created a series of engravings and four sculptures. It seems that your time at ElicaMex was essentially a struggle between individual expression and the manufacturer’s pursuit of homogeneity. How did you resolve this?
Jorge Satorre: At the start, the company made a presentation explaining growth expectations and quality controls. When they asked me what art is, I said, “Maybe it’s exactly the opposite. We artists look for accidents and don’t necessarily follow a plan. You are always looking to standardize production, and we are against standardization.” I tried to find cracks in the company’s sophisticated system. . .
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