With Avarice, artist Fernando Mastrangelo continues his now signature practice of coupling the conceptual message of his work with its material execution. The piece advances a critical comment on the overproduction of maize by a highly subsidized agricultural sector in United States in anticipation of an ethanol boom; corporate proponents of this overproduction keep much of Mexico's fertile soil 'parked' and unavailable to the use of hunger-troubled local populations.

The scope and execution of the work reminds the viewer of the sophistication of Pre-Columbian culture and – perhaps in afterthought – of the total erasure of this culture by the imperial ambitions of the Spanish Conquistadors. It is an ironic revisiting of the cultural grandeur of the Aztecs in the mean material of daily subsistence.

Avarice itself is an appropriation of the Aztec Sun Stone – the centuries old basalt original is considered one of Mexico's national symbols – within which Mastrangelo has turned out the sacral pictographs of the Aztec cosmology and inserted the imagery of corn production, corn products and the corporate players involved.

Unchanged is the Aztec sun god Tonatiuh, who looks out from the stone's center – his knife-like tongue is stuck out in a representation of his hunger for the human sacrifice; the outward pointing arrows – rays – symbolize his constant and insatiable hunger. Within the context of Mastrangelo's work, the viewer can infer the image of the implacable imperial force with which the United States achieves its economic agenda in the Americas.

As within much of Mastrangelo's work there is a materialist remark on the complex relationship between culture, cultural objects and economy in both the historical and contemporary world.

-Matthew Wood