Débora Delmar is a wise critic of the aesthetic habits of her own class. Raised in a cozy golf club in southern Mexico City, she observes how, through gentrification and the privatization of public space, the logic of the gated community has expanded to dominate the entire city. In “Castles,” Delmar’s first hometown exhibition in nearly a decade, she articulates this critique with surgical precision.
At the very entrance, Delmar built a high white wall which she adorned with Locator “66” (all works 2023), a luminous house number corresponding to that of his family’s house. Beyond this barrier stands another parallel, Border, a yellow scaffolding structure covered in a ubiquitous mesh canvas print, like those seen so often outside soon-to-be-renovated buildings in gentrifying neighborhoods. Delmar’s fabric upholstery shows an architectural rendering of the facade of Chapultepec Castle, built for Spain’s viceroy during colonial times and home to Mexico’s last deadly experience with a Habsburg emperor. The image is printed in black on greige – the innocuous but hugely popular beige and gray mix that pops up everywhere, from living and working spaces to Kardashian hotels and abodes. Behind her is Strong, an inflatable sculpture based on the towers and features of the same castle, including its iconic checkerboard floor. The soft, penetrable structure felt like a cheeky pun on inflation and its effects on the cityscape. A castle held up in the air is an apt analogy for a city that is currently plagued by a development bubble causing rampant property speculation and price gouging. On the neighboring walls hang works from the “Community” series, a group of dismembered steel portals: black rectangular frames crossed by diagonal bars. Delmar had previously shown these segments dismantled in one piece at the 2020 Mexico City Material Art Fair, at a booth where promotional flyers for 1950s urbanization projects reprinted on steel sat behind the fence. locked to which only the gallery owner had the key. Delmar often extracts the domestic signifiers of his mostly upper-class peers and turns them into works that nod to minimalist history while remaining on target for his criticism. A cute little piece, Access, swings at the entrance and adds a note of levity to the somewhat severe spectacle. It’s a key lock from which dangle dozens of key fobs, including a few with self-referential trinkets, like the Union Jack (Delmar lived in London for a few years); a smiling avocado, because of his love for the fruit; and a sympathetic caricature of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Delmar’s works are so careful and measured that many describe them as cold or enigmatic. I would just say she refuses to spoon feed her criticism and viewers have to put the pieces together themselves. His approach is more poetic than didactic, but no less urgent for that. Mexico City’s government is currently working with Airbnb to attract more affluent digital nomads to the already sprawling metropolis, which of course means more travel, higher rents, and the tearing apart of diverse but tight-knit communities. Delmar weaves a thread between Chapultepec Castle, with its historic ties to European and American invaders, and this new, less violent, but perhaps no less insidious invasion. In this sense, Delmar’s return to the local scene seems very timely, and his works more mature and eloquent than ever.
