The consumer capitalist conditions pressed upon Mexico in recent decades by the globalising superpower that is its northern neighbour have left it largely dependant upon it for internal and external economic well-being. It has been traditional for Mexican cultural producers, and therefore Mexican culture itself, to endlessly grapple with basic analysis and synthesis of the original racial and cultural mestizaje ('mixture') caused by the Spanish conquest. It is not for Demián Flores to ponder and pick up the pieces of the Old World's trashing of his native country and indigenous culture but to realise and advertise the on-going and potential damage of this new threat to Mexican culture and identity.

Calera-Grobet uses "tradition" to refer directly to that indigenous Mexican-ness so ruthlessly butchered by the conquistadores, but this word also invokes the continuous calamitous debate that the conquest has left behind. The traditional regurgitation and rewording of this debate is an enormous hurdle to the evolution of a nation undeniably rich in natural, spiritual and cultural resources that progress and civilisation have never allowed it to exploit, export or enjoy on its own behalf.

The "new threat," which can be loosely labelled 'Western' popular culture and the mass media marketing processes that are used to disseminate it, combine with postmodernism to create a triangular model for the influential forces within contemporary Western societies and the nature of their influence and contemporary colonisation of others.

Demián Flores, as a Mexican born, brought-up and living in the stage of history so dominated by this triangle, has had this domination rammed-home to him by life in the world's largest conurbation and its near-neighbour status to the triangular model's creator. The power of this omnipresent form of popular culture to enforce consumerism has therefore shaped modern living in to something that bears so little resemblance to the popular culture that dominated indigenous, colonial and post-colonial Mexico.

The self-reflexivity of modern life is both cause and effect of Flores's use of popular culture to dissect contemporary culture. Globalising mass media in turn give this artistic dissection both local and global significance as the iconography that uses him to consume and that he uses to be consumed, exist and operate in identical forms both locally and globally. Arguably the first Mexican artist to successfully achieve an intelligent discourse both visually and conceptually using iconography and content of this nature: this is greatly due to the personal and racial cross-cultural study to which he has been forced to commit since his childhood and home-life based in the last Zapotec settlements of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec that contrast so highly with a Mexico City upbringing. A direct and powerful off-shoot of this cross-cultural journey through life is the exploration of time evident and fundamental to his work.

By cleverly reflecting the issues of "territory, memory and identity" in the conceptual mirrors of super-saturated marketing culture and globalisation that interested voices and radical stances are rapidly reducing to an unintelligible amalgam that is easy to disregard, Demián Flores is founding an authentic channel of communication on historical fact and contemporary thought.

Neil Pyatt
Ocotlán de Morelos, Oaxaca
January 2006

Doctoral research
"Postmodernism in Contemporary Oaxacan Art"
The evidence for postmodernism in contemporary Oaxacan art from Mexico, as an example of the simultaneous causal and reflective relationship between fine art, visual communication and global culture systems."