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"Javier Piñón" by David Coggins

Javier Piñón’s collages of cowboys in desert settings address the appeal of the Western frontier and its underlying myth of America’s power. Piñón, who was raised in Texas and now works in New York, uses images from mid-century road-trip magazines that have begun to lose their color. His meticulously crafted collages are cautionary tales about our tendency, both as individuals and as a country, to cast our struggles as heroic conflicts..

So seamlessly made that they seem to arrive fully formed, like found photographs, the collages are often mounted on yellowed handmade paper, creating a warm setting as seductive as a John Ford Western. Piñón’s earlier works, which featured cowboys swinging on chandeliers and perched on towers of chairs, were more boldly theatrical. Here, richly described settings frame surreal dramas of faded grandeur. Most of the works are intimate in scale—each piece is about the size of an open book--but one of the best in the exhibition was the largest. Don Quixote’s #4 (all works 2007), which is 26 by 48 inches, depicts a cowboy, an incongruous lance in hand, charging on his horse across a desert landscape that is dotted with red rock formations and metal windmills. There’s a balance between the timeless absurdity of Don Quixote’s quest and the more topical –and more tragic—allusions to the misadventures of politicians, self-styled as cowboys.

Many of these collages incorporate Christian iconography or Classical myth. In St. Sebastian, a stoic young cowboy is bound to a tree full of crows, seemingly indifferent to the arrows stuck in him, while in Theseus and the Minotaur a cowboy in a rodeolike stadium wrestles a bull-headed figure—needless violence marked with unexpected comedy. Odysseus presents a cowboy perched perilously on top of a raft made of a heap of Chippendale chairs. Waves crash around him and wind fills the sail as he’s blown out to sea. The image is at once bizarre—the cowboy’s legs fly in the air as if he were riding a bull—and also surprisingly poignant, a cross between Richard Prince’s Marlboro Men and Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. In a scene of epic absurdity, our hero is adrift.