DANIEL MENA: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS...

Daniel Mena has recently received a lot of attention in Chile. Quite uncharacteristically for such a young artist (b. 1980), his work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in Santiago (Sala Gasco, Galería Cecilia Palma, Museo Histórico y Militar de Chile), which have received coverage in newspapers, feature magazines, TV and radio, with interviews by well-known talk hosts. All this has happened within the year following the introduction of his latest series of work, of which the current exhibition is largely comprised. In this brief statement I will focus on this phenomenon and consider how the larger-than-life persona of Andy Warhol might add to the understanding of Mena's great popular reception. I do not wish to establish a formal comparison between Mena's work and Warhol's oeuvre, or to establish Mena's pop art genealogy, but rather to use art history to gain insight into and generate questions about the conditions that surrounds Mena's production and his response to them. Specifically, I am concerned here with Mena's tactics of expanded self-portraiture.

Warhol seamlessly navigated the worlds of high art and commerce. In the early 60s, the time of his emergence as an artist, these spheres still appeared mutually exclusive. Well- prepared and eager to excel in both, Warhol used the skills and methods of his background in graphic design and advertising in his high art production, and for his work as a commercial illustrator he used a mannerist style to evoke the allure and myth of the art world. Daniel Mena exploits a different, yet comparable, set of circumstances. Rather than moving between high art and advertising, Mena operates between the realm of art supported by officialdom and its circles of influence, and the art which might be called commercial and traditional mainly because of its attachment to painting. Mena's work emphasizes the boundary between both realms especially since it seems to neatly fit in it. His usage of appropriation lends the work conceptual grounding, sine qua non for artists deemed worthy representatives of Chilean contemporary art by that nation's official institutions. Yet at the same time, he provides a highly marketable product for dealers and collectors alike by virtue of the great appeal of his sleek and colorful images.

Like Warhol, Mena holds a complex position in relation to the cult of celebrity. He enacts both the roles of parodist and skillful exploiter of this social force, the first by the intervened photorealist technique utilized in his woks, the second by crafting his own persona. To this end he started by creating a fictive world within his work: painting relatives in the guise of celebrities (an inversion of the myth-making process formulated by Warhol), or important events of his own myth of creation such as his parents' wedding. While certainly utilizing appropriation, which he considers his staple strategy, Mena is engaged here in the appropriation of a sociological process rather than in that of an image type. He is appropriating the celebrity-making process by which people from every walk of life acquired the semblance of stardom by having their image rendered á la Warhol in the height of the American artist's portrait-making years. By association, if Mena's relatives are famous, he would acquire the semblance of celebrity as well, a phenomenon which he emphasizes even further in recent work by including his own image in his paintings, such as in El Ataque de las Conejitas Porristas or the series Models and Mortals, or by textual allusion to the latter works, such as in Sex and the City (observa el ataque de las Conejitas Porristas). It is in relation to all these works that Mena's tactics can be summed up as expanded self-portraiture, in that his pictorial self-representation precedes, and is a fundamental aspect of, the self-construction of his own persona in the media. In spite of his talent as a painter, the real name of Mena's game has been "positioning:" to realize the degree to which Chilean society is, indeed, hungry for this kind of celebrity figure (albeit not necessarily to a greater degree than any other), to provide the fulfillment of this need, through the offering of himself as the figure to be consumed, and to do so by utilizing aspects of Warhol's proven language.

The radicality of Mena's move should not be underestimated. With his self-portrait as a star, through his self-fulfilled prophecy of celebrity, he confronts our expectations for contemporary art precisely at a time when the rhetoric of "anything goes" serves as the perfect instrument for exclusion.

María Carolina Carrasco
Curator. (b.1973). MA in Art History, University of Pittsburgh. She is currently a PhD candidate in Art History at New York University. She is also a curatorial consultant for the Embassy of Chile in Washington, DC, and together with colleague Yolanda Colon founded the curatorial collaborative BETWEEN [Purveyors].