In this project there are two authors, and at the same time there is none. On the one hand there is the Mexican artist Alonso Cedillo (Mexico City, 1988) and on the other, the character of José Luis de la Rosa, the fictional author of the paintings that are really Cedillo's creations.

This paradox is part of the charm of the project and refers to its conception. De la Rosa is a character created with Artificial Intelligence by Cedillo, and the latter has given life to the mystery in a game of fiction and reality. José Luis de la Rosa “is” a Mexican farmer whose passion is to portray bucolic postcards of his cattle in the countryside. However, de la Rosa always lived in fear of the possibility that his cattle would be abducted by aliens and disappear, so gradually his style of work reflected his greatest fears and anxieties, forgetting the subtlety of the countryside and capturing schizophrenic images of encounters of the third kind. However, the little we know about De la Rosa tells us otherwise and we know that perhaps it was he himself who was abducted by extraterrestrial life when he did not reappear. Today, his family continues to search for him and this exhibition shows the different stages of his creation in an attempt to discover his whereabouts.

This story then has as a subtext Cedillo's true intention as a post-internet artist, exploring the limits between fiction and reality, narrative and image and above all going beyond the impositions of authorship that are created around the image of the "artist." Barthes and Foucault already spoke of the death of the author as the great condition for postmodern creation, a contribution that Cedillo naturally uses in a triad between the authorship of Artificial Intelligence, the paintings of the fictional character and the conceptualization of the work by the "real" artist. Previously, Cedillo has played with this co-creation roulette, empowering AI to create artists, characters, narratives and works that question contemporary everyday life issues and relationships between politics, society and the individual. For this occasion, humor is the gateway to refer to urban legends and pop culture, as well as the role that technology has today in our lives as an intelligent tool that shares authorship in the creation of stories that materialize in the plane of reality.

In “Vida, Obra y Desaparición de José Luis de la Rosa”, Cedillo satirizes the character of an artist farmer and plays with humor on the co-creation relationship between technology, fiction and its conceptualization instructions.

-Josseline Pinto, Curator

Photography: José Oquendo