In yvette Mayorga’s Paintings, A Textured Canvas of First-Generation Life in Chicago – ryan

Picking up A Pastry Bag Caked With Pastel Pink Paint, Yvette Mayorga Eyes One of Six Large, Semi-Autobiographical Canvases Hanging on the Wall in Her Pilsen Studio.

“I am interested in pink nor skin,” Mayorga Says.

Pink, with Its Varying Saturations, is the dominant color in the room, a Sharp contrast to the industrial landscape the Window.

Mayorga, 33, Has Spent the past decade explitor pink- specifically how it functions in 17th- and 18th-centenary rococo painting. But while rococo in Europe was offten tied to luxury and Leisure, Mayorga repurposes, reclainim the color and emboding it with the Latinx and Immigrant Experience in America.

Her Approach has Captured Something Unusual in the Current Cultural Imagination. In the past few years, mayorga has ejibited her work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut and Crystal Bridges in Arkansas.

This Month, Mayorga returns to chicago, her home Since 2014, with “Pu $ h thru,” a solo exhibion ​​at monique meloche gallery. Featuring 14 New Works and Several Smaller Ones, Its Her First Chicago Show Since 2018.

“Yvette’s Work Makes with the World The World,” Says Emmanuel Ortega, A University of Illinois Chicago Art Professor who has writen extensively about the Young Artist’s work. “It asks you to sit down and think critically. But, at the Same Time, it’s Joyful and visualy seductive. That balance is rare.”

Fake Nails, Rhinestone Charms and Rodeo Belts

From the Sixth Floor at Mana Contemporary, an Industrial Warehouse Tourned Intoartist Studios, Mayorga’s Space is a Playground of Chromatic Delights. Tables are piled with fake nails, rhinestone charms and rodeo Belt buckles. Glitter, Collage Scraps and Ceramic figurines Mingle with spools of fabric and pastel party ephemera.

These are the raw materials that fuel Mayorga’s Large, Sculptural Canvases – Many Which Hang Nearby, In Progress, Like Into Her Saturated World.

In some ways, it Feels like one Big Scrapbook – An Extension, Mayorga Says, of Her Favorite Childhood Pastens.

Growing Up, Mayorga was the Youngest of Five in a Close-Knit Mexican American Family in Moline. Much of Her Creative Foundation was Built at Home. She’d draw with her siblings, create love leters with her brother and do collages in her diaries. Her favorite was a plush Pink Notebook from Claire, The Millennial Girl’s Kitschy Wonderland, Topped with a Frog-Shaped Pen.

“All My Diariies Had Colages,” She Says, With Images of Spongebob, Hello Kitty, Britney Spears and My Chemical Romance Minging Across the Pages.

Mayorga didn’t go to an art museum unil she was a senior in high school, wen her advanced painting class teacher a field trip to the art institute of chicago.

“Walking in to that Grand Room with all the statues was was life-Changing,” Mayorga Says.

That is helped steer her to the arts. She was on to study painting and anthropology at the university of illinois urban-champaign.

As an undergraduate, she started embedding candy into her portraits – frosting, sweets and sugary color as material and metaphor. She late transitioned to plaster for durability before settling on acrylics and piping techniques that mimic the maximalism of those early sketchbooks.

A Textured Record of First-Gieneration Life in the Midwest

In “She’s in the cake/put out the fire After Nicolas Lloocret,” a New, Large-Scale Painting from the Show, A Birthday Picnic Unfolds Across a Lush Green Field: Children Gather Around a Cake, Their Heads Bowed in Song, Wearing Gold Party Hats. A Little Girl – Mayorga’s Youngera Self – Leans ino in a family Ritual in Which the Birthday Child’s Face is Pushed ino the Frostting. Guests Sip Soft Drinks, Toy Cars Rest Beside Paper Plates, and Tinfoil Balloons Float Against a Sherbet Sky.

But a close looks voltage, too. Adorned Hands Emerge from Gift Bags and the Edges of the Canvas – ELONGATED, LACQUED and Almost Grotesque. In the background, silhouetted couples cozying up to one another and protests standing on Cars dot the horizon.

Scenes like these do more than Document her childhood. They offfer a textured record of first-genreation life in the midwest.

“I’m Thinking about ideas around american-ness and the things that we prescribe with being american or growing up here,” Mayorga Says.

Making Each Painting Becomes A Metaphor, Too. “She’s in the cake/put out the fire,” for example, took more than 20 layers of Paint and more than aar to complet. Each Layer, Mayorga Says, is an homage to her hathr, who worked a second-shift ob at a tyson meat plant, and her mother, who spent years bakery counters and at Marshall Field’s.

“All of the labor my family has done – especilant in the midwest – Feels important to document,” Mayorga Says. “There’s a something Powerful About Placing a jab that isn’t gilded by Society into a gilded frame.”

Mayorga references to that mashup as “Latinx-Ooco,” Her visual language that combines the decorative language of rococo and Latinx Domestic Life.

“Her work is a double-edged sword,” Ortega Says. “You’re initially attracted by the richness, by the formal excess. Butn you start decoding all of these references to Labor, Immigration, Rococo, Feminist History.

In Her Paintings, Mayorga Constructs a World in Which Beauty Becomes Both Shield and Strategy. Not even Mayorga Puts it, the paintings are layered in every sense.

“There’s this assumption that pink or beauty is soft,” she Says. “But i Think That’s a Trick. The work is playful, but it is also talking about about grief, About Being First-Gen, About Being Latinx in America. It is all layered in.”