Paris: Capital of sensibility By Peter Leventhal, August 18, 2006, Florencía Riesta Gallery's summer collection

Paintings by Valerie Mejer
Wednesday-Sunday, 3pm, until August 31
Estudio Valerie Mejer,Fábrica la Aurora,Calzada de la Aurora

Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century is the title that German philosopher Walter Benjamin gave his extraordinary work about the Paris Arcades. Formerly the capital of the modern, Paris now evokes a nostalgia for a life that is only a vestigial dream in but a handful of survivors.

Once, over the course of months, I went every Thursday to the Café de Flore to gaze reverently at Samuel Beckett conversing with Alberto Giacometti. Diego Rivera worked in Paris and did gorgeously beautiful paintings.

Julio Cortázar wrote Hopscotch in Paris. So many other artists from Latin America lived there that one could write a thesis on the city's influence on mid-century Argentine writing. As a pastry cook, Ho Chi Minh tutored himself in Paris, working in the kitchen of the great chef Escoffier. What did they seek in those lovely streets? What did I seek in my life there? A certain seriousness of purpose; a unique cosmopolitanism; a taste for the beautiful. "What once comes to us as beautiful," Schiller wrote, "will come to us as the truth later."

De Gaulle complained of the inability to govern a country that produced more than 350 cheeses. When I was 20, I showed paintings in the Rue du Dragon. The postman arrived with the day's mail and after a careful scrutiny of the gallery warned me of the dangers of following the influence of Bonnard. "Monsieur Bonnard," he told me, "had his light, but you haven't the same"-this from a postal delivery man in Paris.

One night, with a couple of thousand other people, I went to hear John Coltrane at the Théatre Olympia. Disgorged into the Boulevard St. Michel, we mixed with a hundred thousand demonstrators against the French war with Algeria. The police liberally beat the stuffing out of all of us. It was one of the few times I felt like a Parisian.

I made solitary visits to the old Musée de la Ville de Paris, which housed a huge collection of pictures by Vuillard and Bonnard. I'd look for hours, alone, with only the guard for company. He followed me everywhere, convinced I was criminal. And hadn't Apollinaire been implicated in the theft of the "Mona Lisa" from the Louvre before the Great War? Then, one day the guard told me how he had caught a clochard defacing a Bonnard painting and how he had jumped on him, wrestling him to the ground.

The director of the museum ran up and looked in horror, yelling, "Let him go, idiot-it's Bonnard!" Bonnard had a little palette in his raincoat and would go in to finish off his paintings. This confidence made me feel a part of Parisian life.
Villon, the first and quintessential Parisian, wrote in his testament: "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" and Proust, 500 years later, responded that they are in the taste of a madeleine.

Derain, Satie, Tristan Corbière, Leo Ferre singing the poetry of Rimbaud and Verlaine, and above all, Marcel Proust, formed my sensibility.

All this comes back to me looking at the paintings of Valerie Mejer, now on display in her studio in the Fábrica Aurora.

I recognize the same sensibility affecting her work as it did mine, the same dreams. Is it not a miracle to discern the dream of another? To comprehend it and to enter it?

All of her paintings reconstruct a series of sensations provoked by sojourns in Paris.

All sensation provokes feelings, and feelings are acts. In this work, it is the recollection of these feelings, as Bergson and Proust remind us, that remains, determining our sensibility.
All of Mejer's work was painted in situ, on the spot. It has a kind of seamless continuity on account of this, yet it exists over time as well.

Some pictures are worthy by virtue of their conception and some, perhaps more precious, because their pictorial events imply that vast transitional world of sensation and feeling eliding, undulating, intertwining in our consciousness but not yet formulated as idea or thought. This is how I see Mejer's work. The very awkwardness of their construction serves to preserve this nexus of sensation. The images are like real life, but not exactly.

We see two women seated in a space, objects scattered around them. What we can feel is the time of day; the variability of the light, the sounds fluctuating in and out of our consciousness. This is the texture and breath of our lives. This breath of life instigates all picture-making of any value. To keep all this effective in the means of pictorial life, in the marks of the brush and traces of the hand, requires delicacy and strength, the toughest and most rigorous strength, which belongs to poets. We see in these evocations of a Paris life the invocations of an existence replete with sensation.

That is what I went to Paris to find: a sensibility, acute and profound, that would give credence, meaning and power to all the feeling I possessed. Those fortunate enough to find this are those with the courage to seek-to open themselves to feel. Out of this comes the luxury and detail of dreams. And with talent and dreams, an artist creates a universal world with a poetic vision.

"13 Visions"
From August 26
Galería Florencía Riestra, Fábrica la Aurora, Calzada de la Aurora

"13 Visions" is a multidisciplinary exhibit of work by 13 artists showing at the Florencia Riestra Gallery for the first time. Each artist contributes his or her unique vision, style and language. Experts in their media, they offer a diverse panorama of styles.

Carmen Parra is a renowned artist of religious images known for her iconography and fascination with the Mexico City Cathedral. Her work includes a cross, a painting and a folding screen depicting angels and archangels with reference to the cultural heritage of Mexico.

Emiliano Gironella presents two large-format serigraphs whose use of color distinguishes them among the emerging artists who make visual reference to the Mexican colorist movement.

Bertha Picallo presents glass sculptures enriched with metals such as steel and iron. Her award-winning work garnered a first-place prize in the Latin American Biennial of Contemporary Art in Glass.

Xavier Esqueda is a plastic artist who surprises with her work and her technique, which she uses to show us spaces and colors in an almost virtual way, engaging the senses, intuition and our own dreamlike states.

Francesca Saldivar shows works with the anxiety of perfectionism; her expression of beauty expression is linked with nature, color, texture and shape that take us closer to the hyperrealism of things. The deceit lies in the transformation of nature in an alternate visual reality.

Ricardo Ángeles is a young artist who creates metal sculptures, transforming them with direct smelting techniques. His shapes hearken back to the primitive but in a contemporary context.

Inda Sáenz creates art that refers to popular culture and the history of painting. In her work, she updates the most important symbols that have passed though the world's memory. In this exhibit, she features a moment in the history of Frida Kahlo, with the typical flowers for the Day of the Dead.

Raúl Bello is a University of Querétaro art and painting professor whose work makes us rethink the various materials that an artist can use to create something. His paintings transformed into collage take us toward the abstract.

Gabriela Martínez is an artist whose works have a material life. Her geometric paintings employ various textures and techniques that create almost architectural spaces that reveal a deep recognition of color and technique.

Catherine Frank comes from Paris and brings to her work traditional European expression, form and color but transforms them into the fantastic. We do not know if these characters are from literature, cartoons or even the circus. We do not know if they are shapeless or if they are the free interpretation of a fairy tale that she wants to tell us through theater sets or myth.

Fernando Garrido works with an iconography that takes us back to the Italian Renaissance. His painting is elaborate, allegorical and symbolic. His patterning of light and shade recall classic painting and ancient techniques.

Some of his lustful, carnivalesque characters remind us of Hieronymous Bosch, but they are always surprising in their attitudes.

Antonia Guerrero is an artist with deep Mexican roots who lives in New York. Her art retains elements of her Mexican identity and iconography. Throughout 40 years of painting she has maintained an affiliation with the genres of the portrait genre and the landscape. In this exhibit she shows a charcoal drawing with a theme of migration that makes us appreciate her skill as a great artist.

Rivelino is a contemporary sculptor who, faced with the challenges of design, decoration, technique, architectural space and material, creates work that forms a sort of new proposal for sculpture, not only in Mexico but also other countries such as Spain, where his work has had a large impact. For Rivelino, sculpture and architecture are intrinsically linked, and his combinations of ceramic and other materials make for unique work.

This exhibit will be open to the public beginning August 26 from noon to 8pm at the Florencía Riesta Gallery, Fábrica la Aurora. For more information, call 154-6247 or email galeríaflorenciariestra@prodigy.net.mx.