Rhetorics of Modernity and Disenchantment

The Ministry of Culture, through the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature, the Academia de Artes and the National Museum of San Carlos, presents the exhibition Rhetorics of modernity and disenchantment. Result of an exploration of the collections of the MNSC and the Academia de Artes, the exhibition aims to record the use of allegory as a rhetorical device for the representation of various imaginaries produced throughout modernity. Through a measured selection of works created over the course of five centuries, the curatorship of Dr. Adolfo F. Mantilla builds a space of transit between artistic codes that allows identifying the way in which various relationships of meaning are produced in the understanding of the allegories. 

The exhibition also raises a reflection on the multiple cultural environments that determined the different rhetorical and discursive strategies used in the representation of modern values. Throughout three sections, a journey is made that shows the way in which these visual "grammars" reveal different conceptions about modernity, generating a symbolic itinerary that is established as a point of intersection between the history of cultural and artistic institutions. and political and representation systems. Images produced by European and Mexican artists show the poetic potential that has allowed allegory to be used frequently in the plastic arts to refer to various value systems. The examples shown work at the same time as contrast parameters that allow to identify the use of this expressive and rhetorical mechanism over time, and the way in which visual languages ​​operate in artistic creation to represent various abstract entities through figuration.