COPENHAGEN.- Frieda Toranzo Jaeger employs painting as a tool for collective, critical liberation from binary thinking and systems of power. At the center of Toranzo Jaeger’s exhibition at Den Frie is a suspended work composed of interlinked panels, making it at once a painting, a sculpture, and a stage. Painted on both sides, the work reflects on the interconnections between capitalism, technology, and visions of the future.

Toranzo Jaeger depicts metaphors of humanity’s ambition to master nature and conquer the universe through science. Her works examine the friction between humans and machines, rationality and desire, a tension heightened today by social media and artificial intelligence. What happens when our autonomy is absorbed by technology and returns to us in an alienated form? By deconstructing techno-utopian dreams, the paintings unfold alternative visions of the future, carried by queer desire and freed from the shadows of colonialism.

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (b. 1988) lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico. She studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg.

Adortional Wreckage - Kerstin Stakemaier

Lately secularization has been on my mind a lot. I live in Berlin. Germany. Christianity was a stable staple of my upbringing. Catholicism to be precise. West Germany was founded on its rehabilitation. And founded everybody’s rehabilitation on it. It stuck. Not just here. Crusades, Colonizations had taken off in the thirteenth century. Scattering Christianity across the known world since, what has been passed on passes on back and forth endlessly in mutations, permutations, anomalies, and variants. Secularization is the name of the variant that caught us here, European nation building’s pride and joy. Secularization is the name under which Christianity sedimented into modern state form; into nation form. Into our time. Here.

The Christian church went on to exist as a ritualistic double of the state that performs its capital form. Crusades too. Secularization has recently been rejuvenated as the name for Christianity going viral. Modern Belief. The belief that makes modern. The belief that spells out who isn’t. Modern. Enough. Ever.

I am starting from Christianity, because the painterly forms Frieda Toranzo Jaeger calls upon originate from its mutating histories of adoration. This is Christian painting in anomalies. Variants of viral altar painting. Variants of permutated devotional painting. Heretically. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s work is adapting provincial livework as inherent to international art. In other words: what has been capitalized into folklore becomes senseless only where it is arrested in its reification. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger breaks its elements out of this arrest and thereby demonstrates in how far modern painting itself could easily qualify for being reified, for being folklore. Frieda Torenzo Jaeger spins its lifeworks anew. Owing to where she grew up. Owing to where she studied. Owing to where she lives. I am here for it. I do believe the provincialism of variants makes Christian capital embar- rassing. Frivolous. Hers. Mine. Yours.

That is of course only if one is not prone to passing one’s homegrown variant as the whole world’s history. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger is not. Her provincialism moves by self implication. Because of this directedness. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s self-exposure as an overall folklorist who offers moveable murals makes her something of an itinerant evangelist, a travelling saleswoman of heretic fables. Her triptychs follow metamorphotic tendencies. Their centers do not offer repose but trapdoors. They open, and each limp that falls into them gets its own hinge, its own devotional attention. Broken hearts. Broken machines. They are mended in Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s panels, they are carved out. The embroidery she stitches into her canvasses with the help of her family, hereditarily, materially, they mark adorational enigmas.

But this is not a world transgressed by Christianity. All is inverted. An invert’s art. Everything here is transgressed: the hearts, the cars, the machines, the good, the bad, the viral… Frieda Toranzo Jaeger stages devotional part objects. Christianity is transgressed. And shall be. No consistently embodied shapes, objects, but interiors with exteriors, ornaments with use, adorational wreckage. Colonizations past and present imprint. They are all incontinent. Undicht. They can’t hold it all in. They don’t really close. The shrines of Frieda Toranzo Jaeger. All are leaking. Offerings. Often unelegant.

But. Their outlines are very often very elegant: the machines, the personage. Here, the machinic personage.

Devotionally recommended readings include: Georges Bataille, Priyamvada Gopal, Donna V. Jones and Gilbert Simondon. Fascism, Modernism, Vitalism, Machinism.

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s double-sided altar serves those, with love. I know that sounds bad. But it only does if you think of love in its Romantic nationalization: a party of pro- prietarian two. A European stateliness of binary reproduction. Don’t. Think of the other one the mutation of Christian love into communal sense. Revolutionary Love. In Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s case all held by cheap hinges and feeble wood beams. The material of her painting’s crutches that allow the works off the walls, travelling, opening into the space in front of them, hanging from the ceiling, lurking in the corners, lying on the floors. There are so many hinges.

Mutating triptychs allover. So many crutches. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s hearts are made of predetermined breaking points. As are her machines. Her shrines. They shall break. Open. They proceed by self-transgression. Only the embroidery survives. Bodies in cushions. Their delivery is meticulous. Yes. I read it everywhere. But I do not see Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s works aiming at perfected surfaces. They are crafted. Yes.

They show her skills. Yes. But they also demonstrate where she loses interest in impregnating her surfaces into finalized devotions. I do see symbolism. And that word too follows her everywhere.

Let me be clear: Symbolism is not good art. It never was. I love Symbolism. The statuaries of one of my favorite ques- tionable Symbolist groups, the Salon de Rose + Croix, which held yearly shows in Paris from 1892 to 1897, stated very clearly, that works would be accepted for the exhibition if they matched its ideals, if they were decidedly nonidentical to the contemporary world. Quality was secondary. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger demonstrates just that. And she demonstrates a tiny bit more. She demonstrates her education. Her aptitude for quality.

Only to then discard it into Symbolisms.

Yes one can totally see Henri Rousseau in this. And sure there is Diego Rivera all over. But let me overstate once more: This is devotional painting Accumulations of adorational wreckage. And those Rosicrucians were turning towards the past as a mythical utopian horizon.

The future had just become progress in theirs. The past darkened out of it. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger lives in a time in which the past is habitually called upon for its utopian horizons. In which the future darkens out of it. So her reaching for futurities, her viral machines, make all the Symbolist sense in the world. The present is perfectly understood as being absolute inacceptable.

Beyond painterly enforcement. There is a Christian skeleton called fascism living on this grass. In front of it an icon of senselessness. But the grass is green and it’s is not raining frogs but unicorns.

The precision of where to move into sloppy, of where to make color flat and lines unfinished appeals to me in Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s work. It is full of affirmations. Beloved references. Projected desires. Stop. Here is a disagreement.

Desires are everywhere. I am not their biggest fan. I prefer needs. I am aware that needs are said to be basic. But have they ever been? For whom? Unbasic needs are shared utopian registers.

Desires to me always seem like the psychoanalytic crutches that make the proprietarian subject (me as much as her or you) forget to want with others. Still. This is no hermeneutic art. So, if Psychoanalysis is unavoidable needful reading would include Jean Laplanche but not Jacques Lacan. Also Lenora Hanson. Definitely Lenora Hanson.

I do write that Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s work is not hermeneutical because its mutualities make its machines perpetu- ally upended. See the hinges. See the uncontained frames. There is no pretense of containment here. There are notations on the flipsides. Travelling shrines function like outsized illuminated manuscripts. Annotated scriptures. Remainders of us littering the future. There is no consistent promise here. Only a practice of transgressed devotional bodies. A demonstration of devotional lives to be lived. Maybe machinic. Definitely obscene. Struggling. And I just repeated the name Frieda Toranzo Jaeger 16 times within 1161 words. Aligning devotional practice.