Growing up in a military family, de Cointet had a marked fascination for the encrypted languages used during World War II and the everyday dynamics generated around them that he fur ther associated with the manipulative carácter of the media. After traveling to New York City where he frequented Andy Warhol’s Factory, he moved to Los Angeles where he worked as an assistant to sculptor Larr y Bell. This was where de Cointet began to use as some of the main sources for his work the dialogue in Mexican radio serials, the world of fashion and the communication codes that mediate people’s interactions.

Finding inspiration in such diverse territories as domestic conversations, literary passages and pre-Columbian codexes, de Cointet conceived over the years a series of situations in the form of graphics and performable texts where words generate images that become narratives without a plot. These narratives-in-the-making are deployed in space as characters activate objects and as the identity of these objects shifts, making them acquire a life of their own that manages to unsettle and transcend the ordinary. This strategy would indeed be of utmost importance to a whole generation of ar tists in the Los Angeles scene, including Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, William Leavitt, Allen Ruppersberg and John Baldessari.

This unprecedented exhibition in Mexico of Guy de Cointet is not only an occasion for the work to travel to a territor y that was familiar to the ar tist. It also presents viewers with an oppor tunity to delve into a seldom-explored terrain —mingling painting, sculpture, storytelling and performance—that has acquired renewed relevance in the ar t making of recent years.