← Hugo Crosthwaite

Hugo Crosthwaite

Detail Mural: “La Apoteosis de un Taco,” 2021, Pencil, charcoal and acrylic paint on Museum Board, 120 x 224 inches overall (305 x 569 cm) (21 panels, 40 x 32 ins each panel)

“The twenty-one panel mural, ‘La Apoteosis de un Taco,’ 2021 (‘The Apotheosis of a Taco’) presents a riotous procession of bodies and Tijuana cityscapes in graphite, charcoal, and acrylic paint on Museum Board. The symmetrical composition depicts an unassuming taco, honored, worshipped and surrounded by entangled and variously compromised figures, intermixed with scenes of vernacular street life, religious processions, cityscapes, and taco stands spiked with found poetry in the form of fragmented hand-painted signs. It is a riff on Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ grand 1827 painting ‘The Apotheosis of Homer.’ The mural fuses tender, playful, audacious, and grotesque characters placed as a chorus honoring the allegorical figure of a taco, which stands as a narrative point for the fertile disjunctions of Tijuana’s social and physical landscape with the figure of death as ever-present, in the tragi-comedy of the border city’s life.” –Hugo Crosthwaite