Surf and Turf

The end of innocence, round one by Julie Boukobza

I am 27 years old, I am living alone for a month at the Pegasus Building downtown LA. I don’t know how to drive, I don’t know what love is, my body doesn’t exist, my work is in between stages. It’s the summer of 2007. Milena Muzquiz is rehearsing in an old garage in Echo Park, she is wearing a white dress, that compliments perfectly her non-ephemeral-tan. She is singing along with Martiniano Lopez Crozet, her partner in their band Los Super Elegantes. They pretend I don’t exist until they come to me and smile. Their smiles are not from this America, they are warm and meant to stay. Few days later she comes in her old Volvo for a swim at my building’s pool and takes me for a ride. She knows I am feeling Heloïse at the Plaza kind of lonely, our mutual friend the artist Miltos Manetas introduced us, she takes it as a mission to entertain me. She is one of the most fun and beautiful women I ever met. We bond over way too many serious addictions: cobb salads with a side of French fries, Prosecco, dancing all night in her garden and its avocado tree, tales of (her) love stories better than the Met Egyptian collection, Paradise Cove, Reunited by Peaches and Herb, Shareen’s vintage store and it’s pile of three dollars dresses lying on the floor. This first trip to LA ends by an article I wrote about their band in l’Officiel magazine and starts a friendship of almost two decades.

I am not here to talk about our friendship but about her art.

But it’s pretty much the same since it evolved so much over the years that only knowing her so well made me grasp her rapid changes and constant evolution. Milena understood better than any Dardennes brother’s gloomy movie that constant movement is the only way to navigate this life. One extraordinary fact is that we both became single mothers few years apart of meta Sicilian boys. Maternity saved us and killed us. It made us (almost) loose appetite for Cobb salads and vintage shopping but we became finally obsessed by someone else than us or by the men that keep passing by our lives. In Milena’s case she believes single motherhood explains why she uses an endless variety of materials and techniques in her process, since her days and notion of time are always fragmented, her practice becomes a long and ever interrupted sentence by drop off and pick up of her son.

At the genesis, Milena’s work was first her voice, her music, her body and her movements. Also her costumes, her sets, her videos that were all created together with Martiniano. But when Los Super Elegantes ended few years after we had met she started making ceramics again. I organized her first exhibition in Paris in 2014, it was called Budlight, it was meant to be a flower shop with her works as vases. She gave me one work from that show, I still have it at home. It’s painted in a matte blueish grey, it looks like an ancient giant Greek vase that was rediscovered years later at the bottom of the sea and pimped and refurbished by an outsider artist in love with nature, the history of design and tales of past tropical trips.

Today she is opening Surf and Turf her fifth exhibition with her gallery Travesia Cuatro in Madrid. There are around 30 works in this exhibition , oil paintings, ceramic sculptures, vases, watercolors and jewellery. The titles are an array of pop cultural jargon. A morning mug of coffee with “# 1 mom” written on it, newspapers’ articles about war, advertisements for all inclusive vacations, “Stone broke” homeless attitude sprinkled with sunshine and dolphins. Pinning the work down to a landscape of everyday language and common duties energized by relentless movement. The experience is the point, according to Milena : “trusting in the process is the only secure investment I can make if I banked on concept there would be no room for mistakes. Mistakes are the hometown of every piece, if I had a clear idea of what I was doing this work would die.”

One of the central works of this show is titled Tiffany-twisted it comes from the lyrics of Hotel California by the Eagles, weirdly enough it’s original title was Mexican Reggae:

Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes-Benz, uh
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys that she calls friends
How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget

To quote Milena again : “Out of all the work I think Tiffany twisted says everything. It was made by tie dying the canvas with colored oil paint first then covering it with wax and white oil pigment. I filled a spray gun with blue oil pigment and shot at the edges of the painting for fun. I carved a lot of the painting out and pulled the color from the under painting. I was thinking of negative space. The imagery of frogs came from Japanese ink drawings of animal battles and Mexican souvenirs from the 1970’s of taxidermy frogs drinking and dancing. The title is from that cheesy tourist song Hotel California by the Eagles. I made it mostly with my nails, scratching it like a lover’s back.”

During the course of writing this text, Milena and I had a ridiculously hard time calling each other because of the time difference, and for the reason that I would pick up my son from school the moment she dropped hers off. In an idle moment of no communication between boomers, she asked Chat GPT: “I am an artist, I am from the border town of Tijuana and use images of things similar to what you see in a tourist shop, I want to be critical of these things not literal, how do I express that? “

Chat GPT’s answer:

“Your work often features fragmented scenes of beaches, flowers, charms and the kind of pop-cultural detritus you’d find in a souvenir shop. You do not just recreate these scenes; you distort them, layer them, and push them until they reflect the reality underneath—the tension between the marketed paradise and the environmental and social realities that are there on the surface, the real mess of a border town.”

Don Henley from the Eagles who wrote Hotel California’s lyrics said: “In a sentence, I’d sum it up as the end of the innocence, round one”. The notion of Innocence is something forever at play in Milena’s work. Not far from this Shakespeare quote in Macbeth:

Look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under’t