Pesados

Gallery Bogart is pleased to present a solo booth of new sculptural works by Mexican artist Napoleón Aguilera (b. 1986, Guadalajara), drawn from his ongoing project Pesados.

The title hinges on the double meaning of the Spanish word pesado: literally “heavy,” in reference to the physical weight of the works, and colloquially, in Mexico, a term used to describe high ranking figures within criminal hierarchies. This ambiguity is central to Aguilera’s practice, where material weight becomes a metaphor for social status, and authority.

The project takes cowboy hats and boots as both objects and cultural signifiers. Traditionally associated with the sartorial codes of old-school crime bosses, Western dress has long operated as a visual shorthand for power, masculinity, wealth, and rural mythology. In contrast, contemporary generations of kingpins have increasingly adopted the language of luxury fashion and haute couture. Aguilera collapses these seemingly opposing codes, producing an aesthetic in which the bucolic and the exotic coexist with violence and excess.

The evolution of “Pesados” also marks a shift in material language. Basalt and obsidian, dense, geological, and unmistakably Mexican, give way to two pairs of sculptural boots carved in cedar, each accompanied by its own hand-carved wooden case. The new material introduces a certain lightness and formal freedom, allowing the footwear to be playful and become increasingly capricious and extravagant. Here, the boots are no longer merely an accessory or symbol, but a vessel for status and power, an object that is at once comfortable, precious, absurd, and threatening.