Aliens - Art and Text by Enrique Chagoya

Aliens is a timely new monograph of art and pithy texts by the eminent San Francisco artist and Stanford professor Enrique Chagoya. The 128-page book features paintings, drawings, lithographs, and twelve of Chagoya’s singular codices, with sixteen foldout pages.

Aliens explores some of the artist’s pioneering themes: “Reverse Anthropology” and “Reverse Modernism,” and is filled with the artist’s brash, spot-on humor. Aliens is divided in halves, with two front covers. One half proceeds from left to right and showcases single-page works, while the other half unfolds from right to left, in the traditional manner of codices. Although the book is printed on heavy stock in a wide, landscape format, it sells for twenty-five dollars.

Chagoya’s art reminds us that we are all aliens; it speaks directly to the absurd and horrifying return to tribalism in our time, as many lives are threatened and numerous freedoms curtailed.