El Triángulo Perfecto

El Triángulo Perfecto watches a police motorcycle squadron rehearse a human pyramid and finds in its collapses a portrait of authority as slapstick.

Calderón photographed the motorized unit of the Mexico City police as they practised the stunt they call the perfect triangle: riders standing on each other's shoulders as the bikes roll in formation. The pictures record the attempts as much as the pose, with officers tumbling into the sand, helmets and gloves scattered. Sixty-four pages in a pocket-sized clothbound hardcover, with a text by the writer Carlos Velázquez and a short account by the artist, published by CONACULTA in 2015 in Spanish.

Calderón (born 1971, Mexico City) co-founded the artist-run space La Panadería in 1994 and has worked across video, photography, sculpture and painting, most of it aimed at the stereotypes and rituals of Mexican public life: hunting trophies, telenovela villains, the police. He is represented by kurimanzutto and has shown at MoMA PS1, the Hammer Museum and the Museo Tamayo. This book belongs with his other photographic series in which official spectacle is allowed to fail on camera.