"Car crash study (detail)" Sculpture

1975, Mexico City. Sculptor and photographer interested mainly on working with manufactured objects.Jose Luis Rojas practice started simultaneously to the conformation of the artistic group Los Lichis (Gerardo Monsivis, Manuel Mathar and the artist himself), an alliance whose aspirations were not as much artistic as collective. Since the late nineties their clearest gestures were the playfulness, mischief, informality, teenage ease, along with the progressive vandalising of the property located in Andador 20-1 at Fovissste-Miramontes state housing. This could be read now -ten years later- as their highest ongoing piece. The long-life sessions together, in such specific conditions as being forced to remain chained with handcuffs during five days in a hotel room, led improvisation in the music field and in the fine arts as well.In the video and photographic series Pumpin Barbie (1997) realized by Los Lichis, thecharismatic doll and her friends are expelled from the closet of navet, and they are shown as sexed, violent, and excessive subjects. Their organs and fluids are exposed as grotesque prosthesis of plasticine, in the best Paul McCarthy style. These images are a parody of melodrama, but equally of pornography.Throughout his passage along with Los Lichis Rojas inherited the transgressive exercise of constructing scaled sceneries: a flat as the reproduction of the world, and a gang of toys as the reproduction of a society, its characters and instruments. This inheritance is literal, since the photo-series Fovissste Conflict is constituted by a number of stills that resulted from the staging and documentation of several explosions and bombings inside this connoted house.The artist refers ironically to the media-habit of overexposing the public to turbid images, to incite paranoia in the first place, then sensationalism, and finally indifference.For the Taliban series (2004-2006) this artist steals the most bucolic of all the Christmas traditions in Latin culture, and recruits ceramic figurines to characterise them as the Afghan militias trained under the sponsorship of Ronald Reagans government, and still kickingafter 9/11. The Bethlehem crche doesnt seem to be a stop on any map, and instead of gifts these legions flaunt rifles, bazookas, automatic machine guns AK-47 and M-60,produced all them in the US, Britain and Rusia.