Curator, Roxana Marcoci: Arturo Herrera revisits age-old themes of innocence and experience by excerpting, slicing and reconfiguring images found in cartoons, fairy tales and coloring books, among other visual sources.
This Wall Painting reorders bits of imagery taken from a coloring book based on the Walt Disney 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. You can make out forms taken from the dwarfs’ rounded shoes and floppy hats. Even though such imagery is never explicitly depicted, familiar shapes make the piece seductively accessible.
Disney historically sweetened its versions of traditional tales. But Herrera’s disturbingly reconfigured world resurrects the darker side of these stories. The artist has pointed out that the cheap materials he cut up for his early work -- old books, magazines and comics, quote: “produced the most surprising and challenging fragments, filled with abstract and surrealistic references while maintaining a lingering connection to their origins.” Here too, Herrera confronts us with the combination of the familiar and the uncanny.
This wall installation is based on an earlier work by the artist. Its original fragmented images have been overlaid, flipped and reversed. There is no modulation of texture, no color variation, no specific point of focus. The result is a dense screen of intertwining forms, full of rounded, undulating lines which recall the cartoons themselves. As Herrera abstracts his cartoon sources, he defamiliarizes the fairy tales on which they are based, reminding us that childhood stories are never wholly innocent.