ADÁL

In "I was a Schizophrenic Mambo Dancer for the FBI" ADÁL has collapsed self-portraiture's allegedly self-referential quality. His work's satiric trademark arises from the constant mockery of the possibility of ever achieving an ultimate, definitive picture of one's self. By exposing the absurdity behind the search for ultimate reference to selfhood in art adál challenges the notion of literalness by stretching it to its limits. His relentless punning on literal meanings has become the most priviledged artistic principle in his work and has enabled him to address perhaps the most slippery characteristic of his own biography: his double cultural allegiance as a Nuyorican. Through this mechanism he has been able to succesfully incorporate the potentially satiric quality of the spanglish language sandwich and bilingual code-switching into his self-portraiture without making it strenuously conceptual and to tackle the scandals of the day with theatrical irony.

Jose Luis Falconi

Harvard University