Untitled, from Toledo/Guchachi

Toledo’s work disrupts the boundaries erected by traditional art discourses that distinguish between “high” and “low” art and separate traditional artistic expression from the contemporary. He fuses pre-Columbian symbolism with allusions to works by modern artists like Paul Klee and Rufino Tamayo and modern writers such as Franz Kafka, creating fabulous universes where human and animal worlds merge. In the works in the Toledo/Guchachi series, Toledo drew upon the Zapotec myth of the guchachi (iguana) and illustrated it with vividly graphic devourings, copulations, and metamorphoses of human, bestial, and animal characters. These depictions disturb the natural world order narrated in the legend in order to visually reshape it into a sensual, even violent, universe in which animal and human live in symbiosis.