By CAROL KINO


The day before the opening of his show at Harris Lieberman Gallery in SoHo in New York, the Mexican artist Daniel Guzman was crouched on the floor, lashing bamboolike sticks together with leather cord to create rectangular building blocks. The sticks were carrizo, he explained, a traditional cane used by the Mixtec people of Oaxaca to make everything from baskets to buildings. The blocks would soon be assembled into a squared-off shape resembling an altarpiece, topped by a shattered ceramic head.

This is the first time he has worked with this material, Mr.Guzman said.“My mother is from Oaxaca, and I have Indian blood. I wanted to confront my personal and historical background.”

Other constructions made from carrizo were already in place around the room. Mr.Guzman had festooned them with personal possessions like an old transistor radio, vinyl records, a shirt and a pair of pants evoking a scarecrow or a body stretched on a rack, and a Mexican boxing mask dangling like a severed head. He said the series, titled“Everything Is Temporary,”was his take on the New Fire ceremony, an Aztec ritual involving human sacrifice.

Although Mr.Guzman, 44, has been making multimedia work for years, he is probably best known for his exuberant, densely layered ink drawings. For the last five years they have been on the international biennial circuit.

Because Mr.Guzman’s drawings often employ cartoonlike imagery as well as text, it is easy to assume that he is imitating artists like Richard Prince or Raymond Pettibon. That perception irks Jessie Washburne-Harris, a partner in Harris Lieberman.

“What people don’t realize is, Daniel didn’t know Pettibon till later in life,”Ms.Washburne-Harris said.“I think it’s really important when you’re looking at Daniel’s work to think about the history of the graphic arts in Mexico.”

Recently Mr.Guzman has also begun to make use of Aztec symbolism, as in his 2005-7 diptych series “La Busqueda del Ombligo” (“The Search of the Navel”). While the heavily inked images suggest bitterly political satire about the tax man, the military and the like, they are also heavily laden with Aztec symbols like rabbits, skulls, snakes and the moon.

The work at Harris Lieberman, on view through January 10, focuses more pointedly than ever on Aztec imagery, starting with“El Sol de Mexico,”from which the show takes its title. Using very simple materials - two layers of glass with strips of vinyl and black paint - Mr.Guzman has created a rendering of the logo for the Mexican daily newspaper El Sol de Mexico. The sun, of course, is also a major player in Aztec mythology.

The show also includes four drawings that link the concept of Aztec human sacrifice with the carnage currently being wrought by gangs and drug cartels in Mexico, where gruesome murders and beheadings have become a routine part of doing business. Each drawing is centered on Mr.Guzman’s exacting rendering of a recent cover from El Grafico, a Mexico City tabloid that has reported on this violence in lurid detail. On the cover depicted in“Masacre Sin Fin”(“Massacre Without End”) a body is wrapped in a shroud. Around it float drawings of disembodied heads - a frequent sight in Mexican tabloids - and a single weeping eye .

Initially Mr.Guzman found himself leaving his love of popular culture behind to focus on abstract paintings.“For a brief time I forget my background,”he said.“But fortunately I have very good teachers. They say,‘Go to wherever you want to go.’And when I returned to my background, I recovered material to work with.”

Although this material has given Mr.Guzman an international career, he said he has no intention of leaving Mexico City.“I feel at home there,”he said.“I can never live outside of Mexico.”

Instead, he said, he prefers to follow the lead of the Situationists, an international conceptualist movement that flourished in the 1960s.“The Situationists said,‘Be local,’”Mr.Guzman said.“When you become clear about your personality and where you live, you become universal.”