CLAUDIO DICOCHEA

Born 1971 in San Luis Río Colorado, Mexico. Lives and works in Phoenix, USA.

Claudio Dicochea, De Queen y Sitting Bull el Presidente (of Queen and Sitting Bull, the President), 2009, acrylic, graphite, charcoal and transfer on wood, 121.9 x 91.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale

Claudio Dicochea is a Mexican painter based in Phoenix, Arizona. Born in San Luis Río Colorado and raised near the Mexican–United States border in southern Arizona, Dicochea studied at the University of Arizona and the San Francisco Art Institute and recently completed an MF A at the Arizona State University, Phoenix. Drawing from his own experience of being raised in the geographic intersection of Mexican and American culture, Dicochea’s work is a contemporary re-examination of the mestizaje, or mixed-race identity. His layered and visually dense paintings host a motley cast of figures and motifs dealing with the legacy of colonial representation, hybrid identity and contemporary media stereotypes.

For the past few years Dicochea has been working on a series of paintings based on eighteenth-century Mexican casta or caste paintings that were made to illustrate racial mixing in the New World – primarily miscegenation between European, Native American and African peoples. Casta paintings depicted series of families in a quasi-scientific spectrum that ranged from lightestskin (the ideal of the white, Spanish male) to darkest skin, in an effort to image and classify colonial social structure. Dicochea takes these forgotten relics of Enlightenment ideology as a point of departure, replacing the original subjects with figures from celebrity and popular culture, comics and history.

In de Madonna y OJ el Marciano (2009), Madonna, dressed in folk costume and a cowboy hat, leads a small procession of unusual companions resembling a troupe of travelling musicians: she is joined by a guitar-strumming mariachi figure with the head of O.J. Simpson, who is, in turn, flanked by a diminutive E.T. In other works, Queen Elizabeth poses with Chief Sitting Bull; Guan the Taoist god of war gallops towards a two-headed Paris Hilton; and a monster-child is flanked by its apparent parents Princess Diana and the unknown Mexican ‘Pedro’. With such wild associations, the artist uses humour to subvert racial and cultural stereotypes, as well as clichés of celebrity, and social identity and standing. In his revisions of the quaint but sinister casta images, Dicochea topples racist hierarchies of skin colour with a subversive tactic: white women and dark-skinned men become the leading actors. Unsettling the dominant trope of white male power, biracial couples combine with elements of Mexican folklore to challenge closed and oppressive definitions of who we are and what we may become.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2010 ‘New Works’, Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
2009 ‘Remastered’, Harry Wood Gallery, Tempe, Arizona, USA
2007 ‘Tormento y Amor’, Arizona State University Downtown, Phoenix, Arizona, USA
2007 ‘Monster Desire’, HO PE VI Art and Culture Partnership, Arizona, USA
2004 ‘New Confessions’, Nuestra Tierra, Half Moon Bay, California, USA

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘Locals Only’, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona, USA
2009 ‘Everything is Illuminated: Revealing the Back Room’, Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
2009 ‘Arizona Biennial’, Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona, USA
2009 ‘Opuntia Vulgaris’, Monorchid Gallery, Arizona, USA
2009 ‘Otra Voz’, Coconino Center for the Arts, Arizona, USA

Selected Bibliography

John Abrahamsen, ‘Otra Voz’, The Noise, January 2009
Scott Andrews, ‘Claudio Dicochea at Harry Wood Gallery’, Java, May 2009
Scott Andrews, ‘Locals Only at Phoenix Art Museum’, Java, August 2009
Penelope Bass, ‘Culture and Controversy’, Flagstaff Live, February 2009
Richard Nilsen, ‘Chicano Art: A New Vision’, Arizona Republic, July 2009