Domingo Nu–oÕs work is influenced by a variety of sources, including Pop art, Japanese anime, flipbooks, and especially by fotonovelas-popular Latin American comic books that combine a written story line with scene-by-scene photo illustrations. The narratives in fotonovelas usually involve some form of moral posturing. It is this dilemma- pleasure derived by the suggestion of seduction while simultaneously expounding a moral lesson-that creates the intense drama that fuels the popularity of the fotonovelas. Using commercial software, Nu–o manipulates images from a database he has maintained since 1994, culled from sports, fashion, and pornographic magazines, the Internet, family albums, and postcards, to various degrees from its original form in order to reconstitute a story line. Elements are separated from their original narrative context and recombined to achieve an altogether new narrative often centered on sex and violence, as exemplified in the sexualized and stylized rendering of the characters. Rather than being presented in its original book form, the appropriated imagery is reconstructed as a print with multiple layers of actions so that the viewer searches for structure from plane to plane. The linear narrative, however, is replaced in favor of a larger implied narrative that neither progresses nor regresses, but rather opens up a particular moment to other readings by the reorganization of the original imagery, digital manipulation, and the introduction of foreign elements. Like the works of Andy Warhol, the formal device Nu–o has created in his altering and recombining of images allows for numerous solutions to his compositions, as well as alternate narrative endings. His post-Pop aesthetic, incorporating distinctly Mexican imagery, demonstrates Nu–oÕs negotiated position between the cultures on both sides of the Mexico-United States border.
from Axis Mexico: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions, San Diego Museum of Art