In the 1940s, Henry Moore visited Mexico. There he had the opportunity to see the stone carvings known as Chac Mol. On his return to England, he set about exploiting this motif, resulting in a long series of reclining figures. This gesture represents a subtle form of neo-colonialism: Henry Moore, a white English artist, a subject of one of the greatest colonialist empires in history, uses this gesture to perpetuate the appropriation of artistic creation from another culture and present it as his own, the notion of colonialism.
Del Paso returns with great humor and irony from Moore, who he has perceived as olympically colonialist, and presents us with the Chac Mol in lego bricks as a pre-Columbian creation. The work has a tone of farce: no one will believe that the plastic Chac Mols is a pre-Columbian creation.
John Nadador
