Artist illustrates the “dissolution of the masculine being, a violent and destructive agent”

▲ The artist in his exhibition , *Unbearable Modernity*, secondhand drawings. Photo courtesy of the Taller Popular de Oaxaca.

From the Editorial Staff

La Jornada Newspaper, Sunday, September 7, 2025, p. 4

Through 40 illustrations, mostly on brown paper, artist Daniel Guzmán “presents the process of unfolding and dissolving of the masculine being, a violent and destructive agent, that man who should be dead,” in the exhibition La modernidad insufrible, dibujo de segunda mano (Insufferable Modernity, Second-Hand Drawings), on display at the Taller Popular in Oaxaca.

The exhibition is part of the project The Man Who Should Be Dead (EHQDEM), a series of collections from the Tamayo, National Art Museum (Munal), Amparo, and Contemporary Art Museum (Marco).

In 2017, Guzmán began a series of drawings, which he divided into chapters; the most recent presents an investigation of moments and scenes inhabited by the man he speaks of. “Drawings that are a human mixture and a breeding ground prepared with portions of the accompaniment of William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Mariana Enríquez, Ricardo Piglia, Leila Guerriero, Lucia Berlin, Paul B. Preciado, Roberto Bolaño, Phillip K. Dick, and Mark Fisher, as well as films and other artifacts of so-called popular culture. From cradle to grave, customs, values, and beliefs are inheritances, knowledge, used junk, passed from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, and from generation to generation: secondhand things,” the artist details in the text accompanying the exhibition.

Guzmán, whose drawings are the result of a constant and disciplined search, guided by the intuition of the hand that translates the imagination, believes that “like walking Xipe Totecs, we carry the infamous skin of modern and contemporary history, the horror of bloody and violent habits, the garments of multiple personalities: king, master, businessman, capitalist, colonialist, fascist, Nazi: all white, all black, all red, all yellow. To hide the ruin and the slaughterhouse that the planet we inhabit has become, we invented our personalized, digital and portable concentration camp, which separates us from the horror of this end of the world until destiny catches up with us.”

In a conversation with Mónica de la Torre, the artist mentioned that throughout his life he has had a connection with literature, “I love books, I like reading, my first love was books, more than the plastic or visual arts, because as a child, my father bought Mexican comics at home and looked at the graphics, but more than that, I was interested in reading. When I began this series of drawings, I think the conceptual framework was like a novel or a short story, not in terms of graphics, but in terms of concepts. That's why I used subtitles to divide it.”

That's why he created a visual narrative: "Many of my earlier drawings had text taken from the newspaper or books I read; then I removed them all and kept the visual, to experience something that didn't convey meaning."

Guzmán's visual language ranges from comics to pre-Hispanic iconography, including newspapers, caricatures, and popular music. His work is characterized by the integration of elements of the urban landscape and autobiographical references.

Unbearable Modernity, Secondhand Drawings: EHQDEM by Daniel Guzmán will remain on display until October 17, 2025, at Taller Popular (Porfirio Díaz 413, Historic Center of Oaxaca) from Monday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.