The Chilean artist Felipe Mujica is showing an exhibition specially conceived for the message salon space. “Everything that begins as comedy inevitably ends as mystery” plays with mischief, with the artist formally combining different cultural codes to create the next puzzles and interstices. In the installation, Felipe Mujica cites the cliché of Latin American mysticism as an emotional combination of pathos and nostalgia and the longing for the connection between all things.
Visual elements of Latin America’s popular revolutionary murals and memorabilia from Western psychedelic pop culture are combined in striking graphics, stencilled on glass or screen-printed on fabric.
“Everything that begins as comedy inevitably ends as mystery” (“Todo lo que empieza como comedia indefectiblemente acaba como misterio”) is a sentence from the novel “The Savage Detectives” (“Los Detectives Salvajes”) by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. The novel about the attitude to life of a new generation of poets in Latin America was a great success at the end of the 1990s and is considered one of the most important works of recent Latin American literature.
The exhibition at message salon in Perla-Mode is Felipe Mujica’s first solo exhibition in Zurich. In September 2005, Felipe Mujica, Johanna Unzueta and Diego Fernandez presented a joint exhibition and performance at the message salon on Rigiplatz, and gave a lecture on the off-space Galeria Chilena, which Mujica and Fernandez founded in Santiago de Chile in the 1990s. Felipe Mujica and Johanna Unzueta have lived in Brooklyn, New York, with their son since 2000.