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A traveling carnival
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Tag Archives: Guanajuato
Presa de la Olla
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Proyecto Pastita, Mexico
Thanks to Gringo Micah for getting me and the community out there to clean up the river path that cuts through Colonias Pastita and Paxtitlan in Guanajuato.
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A few night fragments
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Side street
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Plazuela San Roque
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Meson de San Antonio, Guanajuato, Mexico
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Three people with lines and colors
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What I Saw at 81 Positos
The art show at Foro Cultural 81 (81 Positos, Guanajuato) featured two artists. Cati Gris’s main body of work centered on shades and variations of texture and line and shape – the geometrical building blocks of visual reality. These abstract geometrical compositions, however, are typically enmeshed in organic, textile materials.
Castillo Moderno Elegancia del desierto Paisajes para invocar a la lluvia
Teclado de piel
Vela amarilla Vela rosa Series rotoplast versión #6
But something more. Also a sense of palimpsest layered in earth colors, more cool than warm, subdued, a sense of hidden details, hidden bytes and bits of information, patterns lying almost unconsciously beneath the visual surface and requiring a close-in look (“Catedral el llama desde internet”).
Catedral en llamas desde internet
A few of Gris’s works leaned in along the gradient from the abstract toward the representational, without giving too much on the representations side. The jittery electronic universe that almost comes into focus in “Dispositivo para presenter colores básicos” struck me as such, as did the archetypal figures emerging in silhouette from the geometry of “Chalchiuhtlicue”.
Dispositivo para presentar colores básicos Chalchiuhtlicue
Phe Ruiz had two rooms in the exhibit with clearly demarcated themes – one room striking for its texture, one striking for its color.
The second room was full of bold colors with a childlike quality, albeit one haunted, in both style and affect, by the empty spaces of faces. The human-like figures were sometimes cast into elemental environments, either in nature (“El pino”) or in a stylized domestic set, e.g. in “El Mesero,” where we get a solitary figure learning to balance in a rudimentary social space.
El pino El mesero
Sometimes, the same figures found themselves wandering aimlessly in a more abstract setting, the child-appeal of the bold colors offset by the existentialist undertones of face and posture.
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Una caminata
Ruiz’s other room (the first in order of the gallery), full of rich, creamy textures and darker, warmer colors, was heavier in affect.
Las llamas Pink and black
Finally, the venue itself at 81 Positos was elegant and well-lit, and did its part to highlight the power and peculiarities of the works included. And if you were lucky enough to be there on opening night, Alonso’s sangria wasn’t bad either.
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Images of Quijote
Walking the streets of Guanajuato, Mexico, I happened to pass the Museo Iconográfica de Don Quijote on free entry day. Why not? Maybe I was just in the right mood, but what I found inside was astonishing. So many beautiful representations of the Knight of the Sad Countenance! The first room was a nice introduction, and the next two rooms had me near tears. Powerful variations. Romantic (a la Goya), realist, existentialist, things in the German expressionist vein. And the color palettes of the paintings. Pastel patches reminiscent of Paris, burnt orange-red Mexican backdrops, everything. Sculptures in subdued classical and overwrought baroque. Then more paintings – cartoonish ones, sci fi ones, ones that seem to emerge from graphic novels or from a pulp fiction romance of the American West. Weird cubist ones, soft rounded figures in a naïve folk style. And the spaces. Beside the classical museum-format rooms, a Spanish-style courtyard braced by rock solid columns formed a center, with a room to the side like a topsy-turvy chapel. Then a postmodern painting, opaque in meaning, and a modernist sculpture, stretched, fragmented, monumental in size but struggling with itself for coherence. So many shades of Cervantes’s character that all of human nature and human history and human paradox seemed expressed through this one man, imaginary but so multifaceted and universal that one suspects he is more real than the shadowy, ephemeral beings who pop into being and evaporate into nothing after 60 or 80 years. And the art itself. It was as if Don Quijote were a perfect lens through which all of the styles and periods and possibilities of art came into focus. I didn’t notice if any famous artists were curated here (although I later heard that they were indeed) because I was too absorbed in the images to bother to look for the temporal names of the creators.
The only weakness, from my point of view, was the lighting. Given the magnificent range and beauty of the pieces, the lighting did not maximize the power and nuance of the objets d’art, nor of the architectural space itself, to best effect. Also, I would have liked to see a bit more of Sancho, maybe more reflections on Sancho detached from his master.
Despite the niches for improvement, this small museum was one of a handful of my favorites from around the world. I could spend all day there going deeper and deeper into the thought and emotion, the pain and the beauty of lived experience, as conjured up by the madman of La Mancha. At the very least, anyone interested in all the possibilities of portraiture should make a pilgrimage to this beautiful city and this museum.
(Forgive the low-end cell phone photography.)
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shakemyheadhollow 