Felipe Baeza: The Bodies That Refuse
In his collage paintings, Felipe Baeza theorizes what it means to be unruly and fugitive in an often punitive and unwelcoming world. Through a focus on the human body, the Mexico-born, Brooklyn-based artist captures the varied queer and immigrant experiences in the United States.
Recently, I caught up with Baeza to learn more about his artistic process as well as the variety of iconography, like Catholicism and ancient Mesoamerican art, that informs his work.
Intervenxions edited the following interview for brevity and clarity.
Tatiana Reinoza: Why are you interested in devotional imagery and how does it influence some of the choices in your work?
Felipe Baeza: I was born in Mexico and come from two very different families. My paternal side is Catholic, and my maternal side is Evangelical Christian.
The Catholic Church was my first experience with art and how one responds to images that are very visceral. The mural El Ultimo Juicio by Francisco Eduardo Tresguerras in my hometown of Celaya, Guanajuato, depicts a scene of souls burning. Growing up with those images—seeing the body depicted as a landscape—had a major effect on my work.
I am also attracted to the idea of fabulation, how a body could carry so much power. One example is the Virgen de Guadalupe. This strategic image was constructed from two different cultures as a mode of colonizing. But has become something else. I'm fascinated by the different aspects that make that image, and the sort of energy it carries. This idea is a mode of survival. Those images also form a mode of survival for a lot of people who have lost hope. That also showed me the possibility to make our own world. To imagine other worlds that are not yet here.
Felipe Baeza, Actos Santos 1, 2007. Silkscreen, 2 of 6,14 1⁄2 x 16 1⁄2 inches. © Felipe Baeza. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London; kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.
Felipe Baeza, Fogata, 2009. Woodblock, silkscreen, monotype, and varnish on paper, (dimensions variable). © Felipe Baeza. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London; kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.
TR: In terms of representing queer bodies, do you feel like there is a way in which you can also take back some of that power?
FB: As a queer kid that experience of not seeing myself reflected made me feel different. But also at the same time, going to these churches, one sees images that are homoerotic, or the fascination with the body in poses of euphoria and transcendence.
In the early work, I was thinking about how to make queer religious imagery. My earliest prints from undergrad show how I was meshing different source material from erotic magazines and religious iconography. In one of these works, these religious figures are floating in space. There is no ground. The subjects are committing the act of sodomy. That was also my response to the church.
There is also a lot of unlearning one needs to do when one grows up. I always say that the older I get, I accept parts of myself that I neglected before. I think as a queer person there's a lot of performing that is done. We've had to hide different parts of ourselves. We don't actually know which parts are real and which parts are fake. You learn how to mask so well that the mask reinforces to your body. I was 17 or 18 when I made this work at Cooper Union. It was one of the first prints that I did.
There is another work from this time that addresses the mural that I had seen in Mexico with the souls burning. The figures are in bondage engulfed in flames. Those earlier prints were the beginning of my visual language.
“The body is your own home—the only home that many of us have.”
TR: You talk about the body as the landscape. When the colonizers came, they viewed the racialized bodies of Black and Indigenous people as less than human. How are you thinking about the body conceptually?
FB: When I speak about the body as a landscape, it is a response to questions around belonging. There is something powerful about choosing not to belong. That's where the body is a landscape. The body is your own home—the only home that many of us have.
I'm very much interested in enacting these ideas of unbelonging in the work. What is it to live outside citizenship? What is it to choose not to belong? In the past, I would speak about the fugitive body, but I think that term has changed to a mode of suspension and now to a mode of refusal.
In the U.S., I'm seen as the Mexican artist or the undocumented artist. Where I was born, I don't think I'm considered Mexican. For the longest time, I struggled to fit in. I have come to a place where I have no desire to claim either one. What is it to desire something that doesn't desire you? What I'm working through in the studio is this sort of refusal and how to be legible on your own terms.
Within the past three years, the work has changed a lot. At first, I was treating the body as an anatomical body such as in I open against my will dreaming of other planets (2018). Now the body has completely been abstracted and fragmented as you see in Finding home in my own flesh (2020). The limb with sprouting flora and fauna represents what the body can produce. Since then in works such as Wayward (2021), the body is also legible on its own terms. That also has a lot to do with materiality.
Felipe Baeza, I open against my will dreaming of other planets I am dreaming of other ways of seeing this life, 2018. Acrylic, cut paper, twine, and egg tempera on paper, 85 x 90 inches.© Felipe Baeza. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London; kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.
Felipe Baeza, Finding home in my own flesh I, 2020. Ink, twine, acrylic, varnish, glitter, and cut paper on paper, 33 x 48 1⁄2 inches. © Felipe Baeza. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London; kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.
Felipe Baeza, Wayward, 2021. Ink, cut paper, graphite, twine, and acrylic on paper, 66 x 48 inches. © Felipe Baeza. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London; kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.
TR: We both share this love of printmaking, the materiality of paper, and the power of reproductive imagery. One of the things I find so fascinating about your work is this refusal. In my book Reclaiming the Americas (2023), most of the artists were struggling to belong. You're coming at it from a really different perspective.
FB: Part of this might have to do with being from different generations. There was a point when I was younger when I wanted to belong. It took many years of my life to realize that citizenship would not save me.
There was a gap where I stopped making work and found myself within the immigrant rights movement. I went to the South. During the Obama Era, it felt like a necessity to put my body on the line. Growing up in Chicago and then moving to New York, which to an extent are very immigrant-friendly cities, I had never experienced fear. From Mexico to Chicago, there was no transition. It just felt like I went from one brown place to another brown place.
I grew up in Pilsen, Chicago, a vibrant Mexican neighborhood. I always say that I never really experienced Mexico until I left Mexico. That is also the role of memory: we arrive at a different landscape, and try to recreate what we left behind. I went to school at the José Clemente Orozco Elementary and the majority of my teachers were Mexican. Everyone was brown, but they all spoke English.
It wasn't until I was mobilizing with a youth group in North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia that I connected with an immigrant community that was being attacked. What was shocking for me was to realize that they made a life worth living there. That is the role of imagination that even within those conditions, you make a life worth living.
At this time, there was also the battle for marriage equality. I was not interested in it whatsoever. These conversations create a picture of who is the perfect citizen and who is not, who is valuable and who is not, which have never been helpful ways to think through these issues. Seeing my parents and how they have made a life worth living knowing they will probably never acquire citizenship, they're in this mode of suspension. But also in that mode they find ways to thrive.
TR: This mode of refusal also manifests itself in your relation to printmaking. You take methods from it, but then you change the process. You're not trying to make a perfect edition. How do you see yourself in relation to these established traditions?
FB: Well, I have a huge problem with tradition. In undergrad, I applied with a sculptural portfolio. In grad school, I started to expand the use of printmaking and how I worked with paper. I am fascinated by how printmaking is such a layered and unpredictable process.
Printmaking can be a very abstract process, but it is also super technical. There are many elements of surprise that you can't control. I was extremely absorbed by the process. It was hard for me to come out of that. How do I use what I know and not depend on it? That's also when my practice shifted. I was making collagraphs, which is a process where you use a plate and add different textures to create different tones.
I found this map of the U.S. in the trash, and I was carrying it for years. For me, it was about understanding my relationship to this landscape. I felt a sense of responsibility to not regress to the same system that made this image possible or recreate trauma. That's why the image became inscrutable.
Felipe Baeza, Untitled (so much darkness, so much brownness), 2016-18. Ink, twine, and embroidery on paper, 36 x 48 inches. © Felipe Baeza. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London; kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.
This was the first breakthrough to think: I don't need to print this. This is the print. The intention was to ink this up and get a positive. You see the texture of the actual image, but it's not legible.
TR: Your new research on Mesoamerican artifacts, deities, and mythologies shows the body in a state of transformation. How did you arrive at this strategy?
FB: I was using Mesoamerican artifacts and erotic bondage material, collaging them and forcing them to have a conversation. One of the ideas that I was thinking through was how one consumes and desires these bodies or objects— the role of the body in porn and Mesoamerican sculptures in the art market.
Felipe Baeza, Vasija en forma de corovado (Gente del Occidente de México), 2017-2019. Collage on paper, 8 3/4 x 6 3/8 inches. © Felipe Baeza. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London; kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.
Felipe Baeza, Mujer Arrodillada (Gente del Occidente de México), 2017-2019. Collage on paper, 8 3/4 x 6 3/8 inches. © Felipe Baeza. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London; kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.
TR: Why did you call them Objetos de La Nueva España?
FB: These objects were extracted and taken out of context but also forced to have a very different subjectivity. They became the other.
One of the projects I was working on that expanded this theme was Gente del Occidente de México , which came from a book I found in New York that was called Arte Precolombino del Occidente de México (1946), a project funded by the Mexican government. A lot of the objects in the book were owned by intellectuals such as Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Diego Rivera, which made them more desirable. It made me think: What would it be like to reanimate these objects?
The imagery I collaged used fashion and material from erotic magazines to speak about those ideas. When I show them, I display them on a table almost in the same museum-like setting. I took the whole book apart and collaged each page and eventually, I put the book back together. It started to reanimate these figures in some ways. There's a very specific skin tone to the images that I use to collage, which speaks to the actual skin tones available in print. But also to the fact that a lot of these objects have been whitewashed and taken out of their setting.
TR: That reminds me of the documentary film Unpacking the Universe, where curators decided to go back to Colombia and talk to Indigenous people who are living there today. The first question from the Indigenous elders was: What are you doing to feed these objects? To them, they are living beings that you have to nurture, feed, and bring them offerings. How are you thinking about reanimation?
FB: What is it to extract, take an object, and displace it around the world? To be in this fixed mode of being, forever on display and reanimated by thousands of people. And what if the function of that object was to fall apart?
Some of these were ixiptlas, objects used in rituals where they had to be destroyed or buried or else that energy would affect everyone. What is it to think about going to a museum full of ixiptlas and now we're all cursed? As viewers, we forget that the object was made by someone: molded, casted, and that it is a living object and carries energy. That has been interesting for me to think about the responsibility of museums in regards to treatment of these objects. I don't think the answer is returning those objects. That in many ways is going to repeat the same cycle.
I did a project recently where I studied artifacts in museum collections in Chicago, Boston, and New York. They are very specific objects that deal with transformation or regeneration. What is it for these objects to reanimate and imagine that they're thriving and not fixed on display, living to their fullest? I wanted to use these objects as a vehicle to think about larger conversations: ideas of movement, transformation, or regeneration.
Installation view: Felipe Baeza, Unruly Forms (Querétaro). Presented by Public Art Fund as a part of an exhibition on 400+ JCDecaux bus shelters and street furniture in New York, Boston, and Chicago in the United States and Mexico City, León, and Querétaro in Mexico, August 9–November 19, 2023. courtesy Public Art Fund, NY. Photo Ramiro Chaves.
Felipe Baeza, Unruly Forms II, 2023. Ink, acrylic, graphite, varnish, and cut paper on panel, 14 x 11 inches. © Felipe Baeza. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London; kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.
Ritual Impersonator of the Deity Xipe Totec 1450–1500 Aztec (Mexica) Possibly central Veracruz Mexico Art Institute of Chicago.
TR: Can you tell me about the enigmatic titles of your works?
FB: At the beginning, I was referencing what I was reading. I guess to speak about language when language is not there. It's been transformational to read something and realize that’s what I've been thinking about. That has happened a lot with writers such as the Haitian author Edwidge Danticat and queer thinkers like José Esteban Muñoz. Recently I've been making up the titles myself, but in the beginning, I was sort of borrowing lines from books I was reading.
That gives the audience a point of entry to the work, but I think it's also equally important for the work to not be overly contextualized. I'm more fascinated about someone encountering the work without knowing who I am.
I dislike this question of: Who is your work for? I would imagine making work for a 7-year-old Felipe. But the reality is that we live in a world where it is not accessible to 7-year-old Felipe. I think it's such a disservice to say that only specific people should have access to my work. I enjoy reading and looking at work that has nothing to do with my experience. What I take from that is being able to mirror myself in a work or walk away with something. Ultimately, that's what I want viewers to take from the work, to experience the world in a different way.
“I think it’s such a disservice to say that only specific people should have access to my work.”
TR: The titles certainly carry a poetic open-endedness, and you are showing at places like the Venice Biennale now. The work isn't just for one group. It is for the whole world to see and to see a part of you and by seeing a part of you, they're seeing something very specific, too, which is also very beautiful.
FB: I agree. They're seeing something from a very specific experience. Without me having to say that whatsoever. The work has been traveling more than ever. I'm more interested in the work getting out there and to expand these experiences to people that I probably will never encounter.
Tatiana Reinoza is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Notre Dame.
New York-based artist Felipe Baeza (b. 1987) received his BFA from the Cooper Union in 2009, and his MFA from Yale in 2018. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Latinx Artist Fellowship (2023), and his work is included in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.