GREENE NAFTALI Daniela Rossell's repugnant now alluring photographs of nouveaux riches theatrically pos in the tacky easy circumstances of their homes expose a lack that gnaws at the heart of wealth.

GREENE NAFTALI

Daniela Rossell's repugnant now alluring photographs of nouveaux riches theatrically pos in the tacky easy circumstances of their homes expose a lack that gnaws at the heart of wealth. In "All the best names are taken," her first solo display in New York, the young Mexican artist combined large color prints (all untitled, all 1999) from pair series. The "Ricas y famosas" images feature Mexico City's super-rich looking seductive, uncomfortable, or simply bored amid their garish chandeliers, Jacuzzis, "glorious" views, and bad art. in the greatest degree of these subjects are light-skinned women members of the country's elite "European" minority. In single in kind photograph, Rossell poses a world-weary redhead in subordination to three generic portraits of Mexican peasants and, in another, places a rich family's Filipina maid amid the splendor it is her business to dean. Elsewhere, a young Rossell's favorite model, poses in a tennis outfit, the same sneaker-clad foot on the head of a raw materialed lion and an arm draped above a gaudy armoire. On the wall above her hang s accharine airbrushed portraits of herself and other women in the family. The daughter of a former president of Mexico, this gauge Paulina Dias Ordaz, is also the stepniece of Carlos Salinas, the disgraced, exiled leader accused of plundering the country's boxs for personal gain.

The photographs in the "Olympic Tower" series were discharge in a luxury building forward Fifth Avenue in New York, Rossell's passing from hand to hand hometown. One image shows a wealthy woman in a sea of Christmas currents another a scantily clad gazing vacantly through a spyglass at the Manhattan skyline. Amid the panoply of debutantes and Ivana trump-card types, Rossell induded a photograph of Anne DuBong a black psychic who lives in the building and works for many of its residents. Again, the tenuousness of wealth is evident: DuBong's Rasputin-like demeanor reveals the female residents' boredom and, perhaps, a crack in their confidence about the future

Many of the rich and famous in these "lifestyle" images are Rossell's friends and family, and there is an apparent affection and unruffled a tinge of pity evident in the pictures. according to refusing to exoticize the weird pseudo-glamour of the Mexican aristocratic and comprador classes, instead relating it to "our own" '8osstyle exces and bad taste, Rossell deftly turn topsy-turvys the presumptions of ethnography. And besides despite irs many accomplishments, her work, like to a great degree current artistic production, suffers from a certain complacency. Is it really enough to demonstrate that class (like sex or ethnic or national identity) is an unstable, performative fabricate rather than an essence? Has the notion of rigorous, formal critique--which is to say, opposing rather than just posing--become as unfashionable as art about fashion is publicly fashionable?

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