Proyectos AA (Avantgardo & Alvaro): Artist in residence

August 25th, 2023: Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera — serving a life sentence in a federal supermax prison, “the Alcatraz of the Rockies” — penned a letter to Judge Brian M. Cogan, very respectfully requesting he authorize visits from his twin seven-year-old daughters and Emma Coronel Aispuro, his beauty queen wife. 

 

Imprisonment heralds a new era in the life of the criminal as content creator. El Chapo’s correspondence belongs to the same splendid genre as Anna Delvey’s house arrest podcast empire, Luigi Mangione’s jailhouse bulletins about downloading albums by Taylor Swift and Charli XCX, or Joe Exotic DM’ing me nudes.

 

Guzmán ran a $12.6 billion enterprise, built on illegal mining, fuel theft, human smuggling, protection rackets, and, most lucratively, trafficking drugs across the US/México border; by conservative estimates, Gúzman’s Sinaloa Cartel had successfully imported over 200 metric tons of marijuana, 90 tons of heroin, 20 tons of methamphetamine, and 600 metric tons of cocaine: an amount roughly enough for every adult in America to hoover their own private gram two nights in a row and still have a little leftover.

 

Speaking of skiing, whenever I tell upper-crust Mexicans that I’m from Colorado, they waste no time in proclaiming how much they love going to VAIL — that resort town with no town, an Alpine Disneyland for the merely rich. These are people who might derive a certain perverse comfort from El Chapo’s entreaty. Its complete lack of punctuation, its phonetic misspellings and clumsy attempts at deference that never quite land — all might be taken as evidence that no fortune, no matter how incalculable, can scrape the metaphorical dirt beneath one’s fingernails away.

 

Avantgardo and Alvaro Ferreira have taken El Chapo's looping, extravagant longhand and blown it up way up, spraying fragments of it across this residence’s stark, modernist walls. The piece’s title is a nod to Ulises Carrión’s conceptual gesture — “Querido Lector. No Lea.” Don’t read, which of course only makes you desperately want to; like a fig leaf over the loins of early man, it’s this flimsy prohibition that tauntingly secures the gaze. 

 

But here’s the joke: in this case, you literally can’t. The drug lord’s letterforms are so enormously engorged that you’re left staring at a single swoop, a serif, a word — or only half of it — before it is amputated by the hard seam where the wall meets the floor. 

 

I’m reminded of those vinyl decals — adhesive home-is-where-the-heart-is affirmations — that suburban American women slap onto their entryway walls. Such a comparison might sting if it were aimed at a more self-serious pair of artists, or ones less lavishly preoccupied with feminine excesses, with kitsch.

 

"I have never seen my husband do anything illegal," I remember Mrs. El Chapo attesting, indulging a swarm of reporters gathered on the steps of the Brooklyn courthouse where her husband sat trial. Guzmán was “a simple man — a normal, ordinary person,” she continued. In my glamor-enhancing gay guy recollection, she held a quivering pomeranian pinned against her ribs. 

 

On the condition that it emerged from this particular woman’s surgically amplified perma-pouty mouth, a proclamation of such manicured cluelessness was nothing short of iconic. “If that ain’t my sis,” cheered my feeble gay brain. My point is that unless you're packing a certain sensibility capable of rescuing them, anyone's attempts to convey refinement or dignity can land as pitiable to others even slightly more refined. But that’s showbiz, baby! What can you do?

 

— Karim Kazemi 

November 13, 2025