Mongrels #4 is a part of a series of the same name presented by Rubén Grilo in his 2019 solo exhibition, 'Indigo Eye'. The show functioned as a sort of filter, combining the narrative of work with the always unfulfilled promise of the enjoyment and pleasure to be derived from it. Chocolate was used as a metaphor for current employment conditions and the continuous flow of economic speculation. Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, in Roald Dahl's 1964 book, was not that different to many present-day companies and multinationals (e.g., Google) and the situation of many creatives, including artists, working in an economic system that tries to present itself as immaterial, whilst remaining enormously dependent on industrial production and the industrial economy. Willy Wonka is the proprietor of a chocolate factory, which also makes jealously guarded desires and secrets. The plant produces chocolate bars, but it also manufactures emotions, feelings and promises that are distributed even before the bars reach the hands of the consumers, who are turned into incontinent gluttons. In this chocolate factory, the workers also assume the perspective of children, held in thrall by a manufactured desire and happiness. Play replaces work, in a place where time seems to have stood still. Contemporary working conditions are founded on a similar promise of pleasure in and through work. The authenticity of our emotions and feelings is one of the many products of today's capitalism. We not only exist for work; we exist from work. This over-identification between doing (for others) and being (oneself) is also based on a temporal paradox: the fact of being able to work at all times creates the sensation of time standing still, precisely because our working time is extended indefinitely. The concept of end-of-work has been done away with. The results are not the denouement; they are the promise of yet more binding work.

In the 'Indigo Eye' exhibition, three of the four pieces in the series Mongrels were displayed close to three chocolate fountains, shaped to look like the automatic coin counters used in banks. Not only is the continuous flow of chocolate from these fountains equivalent to the continuous flow and production of money, but the two materials generate a fiction of purity, despite being made from different blends, thanks to melting processes in which the artisanal is linked to the industrial. Like a mongrel they are produced from a mixture of different elements. The artisanal guarantee boasted by so many industrial products is once again a promise that is linked to a supposed purity of things. Here, manufactured craftsmanship functions as a market strategy for selling more by buying 'better'. This artisanal mirage of industry hides the true conditions of the artisan in industry, the manual labour of the workers' bodies in the factory. Machines are still heavily dependent on human hands. The plastic coins on a stainless-steel tray that feature in all the pieces in the Mongrels series have been individually hand-painted by the artist. Not only are the processes of individualisation that are believed to be inherent to the artistic process also part of the industry; repetition and standardisation are also part of the art.

Both currency and chocolate coins are the result of a material process of melting, in which moulds are used to create a specific, hyper-reproducible shape within the factory. Grillo's ongoing series Chocolate Mould Pieces, begun in 2015, is part of his research into industrial production, using the medium of chocolate. Whereas 'Indigo Eye' first showed the direct presence of chocolate, his previous pieces evoke a paradox: the impossibility of two industrial objects being identical, even when they have been made from the same mould. In the case of industrial chocolate bars, changes in temperature, unwanted marks on the moulds and different handling processes during packaging all create the potential for error. This produces not only a serial difference, but the series itself as a difference. This alloying of the original and the copy can also be seen in Mongrels, where the pieces are interchangeable, but patently different to one another.

Mongrels also uses an evident relationship between chocolate and money through formal synchrony: chocolate coins covered with metal wrappers, made to imitate metal coins. This correspondence is a parallelism prefabricated by the chocolate industry, whose currencies also accept economic standards, such as the euro — a currency that creates a simulacrum of uniformity despite the enormous economic differences between European Union member states. The perceptual resemblance between the two types of coin conceals notable dissimilarities. In addition to the differences in size, to prevent currencies from being interchangeable, there is no correlation between their exchange value and their market price. A one-euro chocolate coin is larger than a euro and yet it is worth less. The plastic coins in Mongrels add yet another difference, in that they are from different chocolatiers with different recipes. Converted into currency — literally minted — the chocolate evokes not only its status as a contemporary fetish, but also its own past as a material of economic exchange and its historical links to the social elites.

Sonia Fernández Pan