From the Paris Opera to Mexico
By Melanie Harris de Maycotte, 

“El Callejón des Loups” by Claude Mathey Saturday, October 7, 5–8pm Galería/Atelier, Fábrica La Aurora Calzada de la Aurora

Theatrics! In a more minute and humbler form, miniature theaters of life are transported by Parisian set designer and artist Claude Mathey to her found-object collages in her San Miguel debut show, “El Callejón des Loups.” “They’re fantastically original,” to quote an anonymous patron who has prepurchased a piece from the exhibiting gallery.

Mathey studied painting, drawing and sculpture at the Victor Hugo School and the Académie des Beaux-Artes in Paris. It was the theater, the Paris Opera and the movies that originally called upon her creative talents as a set designer when she was a young woman (you can see her beautiful sets in the 1978 Ariane Mnouchkine film Molière). Claude dressed the stage for some of Paris’s most spectacular events and shows. 

She admits it was a wonderfully creative and fulfilling job, yet tiring and taxing as well. It was the search for a personal conversation with her audience, outside of the preordained dialogue of drama, that led this artist to first immerse herself in expression through sculpture. She studied with one of Paris’s favorite sculptors, René Coutelle. Under his tutelage she was inspired to start showing her sculptures at her first individual show at the Salon de Mai in the Grand Palais in Paris. Realizing she had a talent for art and appreciating both the artistic and personal freedom, Claude changed directions back to art. 

So, how did Claude make her way to San Miguel de Allende from the Paris Opera? Unlike many other talented people who have retired to Mexico, Claude has moved her working studio to Santa Rosa de Lima, a small town on the outskirts of Guadalajara. One of her sons fell in love with Mexico a few years back and opened a restaurant in Zacatecas.

Claude came to visit him about a year and a half ago from Paris and fell in love with Mexico and its people and decided that it should be her new home.

Through the most serendipitous events she made her way to San Miguel and was inspired by the beautiful galleries and active art scene and decided to add San Miguel to her compendium of numerous European shows.

Mathey’s sculptural works call to mind another French sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, or even Brancusi or Epstein. Her paintings are reminiscent of a more studied, contemporary, feminine Basquiat, light-hearted yet well thought-out. Peter Leventhal notes, “like most French artists, Claude has intellectualized pop culture without demeaning high culture because of it.” He sees Dubuffet or Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunot’s fantastical imagination in her work. Best of all, her found objects are the matchboxes, bottle caps and tin cans from her journey through Mexico, all magically transformed into some of the most original works of art.

Berchelmann’s paintings at Galería Santa Ana

Paintings by Margarita G. Berchelmann Friday, October 13, 6pm, Galería Santa Ana, Biblioteca Pública, Insurgentes 25

Margarita Berchelmann’s work shapes an abstract expressionism using the language of pre-Hispanic and African symbols, connecting them to the symbolism of the different ethnic groups of Mexico. The paintings are composed with diverse colors, and the artist uses as a starting point ochre and red in opposition to white and black.

Berchelmann studied with such art teachers from the state of Nuevo León as Lilia Mendoza Berruelo and Lic. Jesús J. González Leal, among others.

She has shown her work at many different venues in Mexico and the United States. In June of this year she showed her art at the Galería Moyshen in San Miguel de Allende. The Galería Santa Ana at the Biblioteca Pública will show her work from October 13 to November 15.

Boris Vaskin’s comings and goings

“Vaivén” by Boris Viskin Saturday, October 14, 7–9pm, Kunsthaus Santa Fe, Santa Fe 22A

“Vaivén” is akin to what goes forward and comes back. The tireless wave as a metaphor of the restless spirit, that takes two steps forward and one backward.” 

—Boris Vaskin

“Vaivén” (swinging, or ups and downs) is also a simultaneous exploration of the physical and the metaphysical, reality and appearance, the idea and the material. The exhibit is as visual as it is cerebral. Nothing comes from conventional painting; the canvas is composed as an architectural structure. The encaustic is translated in the exploration of empty space into a highly volatile material, malleable and translucent as wax. Thin strips of wood trace lines in the third dimension. Every space is redefined, so that what is empty is full of a colored substance. Forms grow from others with precise and random divisions. The bi-dimensional plane is converted to small territories with wooden walls that form barriers for the wax. Some pools or channels of wax remain unprinted; small or vast lagoons, untouched by the paintbrush’s gesture, creating a foggy emptiness that appear to be something that they are not. 

Sometimes guided by the intensity and density of color, by the life of the encaustic itself, a work may drastically change in a chromatic coming and going—rational, irrational, expressive and emotional, all at the same time.

The artist comments that “doubt accompanies and envelops the whole work (the doubt about its utility, its meaning, its transcendence), like the doubts that accompany and envelop life itself.”

Wine and paintings at La Carpa

Wine and paintings evening Friday, October 6, 9pm, La Carpa, Calzada de la Aurora

La Carpa presents an evening of organic wine and artwork under the tent. Guests can enjoy the whimsical, colorful canvases of well-known local artist Juan Ezcurdia while sipping organic wines from San Miguel winery Rancho La Romita.

Juan José Ezcurdia, a former psychologist, was born in Mexico City. A self-taught artist, he garnered his first national award for children’s book illustrating in 1997. Since then, his inventive, vibrant paintings have won him local and international acclaim, and his work is in collections around the world.

La Romita produces organic merlot and white wines along with a selection of Italian foods such as prosciutto, salame, cheeses, fresh milk and pastas. The products are available at Fellini gourmet restaurant at La Carpa.

Bustamante’s abstract retablos
By Margaret Failoni

“Retablos Contemporaneos Recientes” by José Luís Bustamante Saturday, October 7, 5–8pm, Galería Manuel Chacon Fábrica La Aurora, Calzada de la Aurora

“Abstraction” is a philosophical term designating an action whereby human intellect derives universal concepts. Abstract art divorces itself from the mimetic representation of the external world. The beginnings of abstraction in Western philosophy and thought on symbolism were born as phenomena parallel to social production, painting, architecture and the artisanal arts. These have in common the importance of the project and the rationalization of structure, and therefore the freedom/autonomy of the form/image.

This theoretical attitude grew more precise following the historic avant-garde movements in which the impetus toward the spiritual or religious shifted to a focus on the popular (Kandinsky), to neoplastic rationalism (Mondrian), to Russian constructivism (Malevich), and so on.

During the 1930s, the abstract experience was generalized in many cultures, first in Europe, then in the United States and, a few years later, in Latin America.

Therefore, abstract art defines the nonfigurative painting and sculpture of the greater part of the 20th century.

Thanks to the two World Wars, many European artists immigrated to the United States and Latin America. For them, the trends of modern art toward a diminished importance of the subject gave significant emphasis to the purely abstract qualities and form (Braque), color (Rothko and Afro), line (Mondrian) and surface (Burri and Rauschenberg). Abstract art is based on the proposition that these formal attributes have an intrinsic and sufficient beauty and expressiveness. Deliberately avoiding the use or concealing the identity of any recognizable form of reality, abstract art is a complete rejection of subject—a total reliance on aesthetic elements.

In 1913, Kazimir Malevich launched Supremalism, a movement based on the creative manipulation of geometric shapes from which Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner developed Constructivism, an experimental form of nonfigurative sculpture. Between WWI and WWII, nonfigurative art progressed hesitantly in an uneasy partnership with Surrealism, but the wide appreciation of Mondrian’s neoplastic gridlike paintings in black, white and gray, coupled with the influential teachings of Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus, had a marked effect on architecture and industrial design, which further influenced painting and sculpture. Therefore, it is safe to say that abstract art saw its beginnings in Europe.

After WWII, abstraction spread like wildfire and confirmed its importance as a persistent, characteristic tendency of modern art. During the postwar years, prominent names linked with this art form were Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Hans Hartung, Franz Kline, Ben Nicholson, Jean Paul Riopelle, Jackson Pollack, Nicolas de Stael, Victor Pasmore, Rothko, Afro and Burri.

The movement had spread to the United States and Latin America thanks to the WWII immigrants. Wilhelm de Kooning, for instance, settled in the United States between wars. New generations such as Motherwell and Pollack were “contaminated” and were followed by San Francis, Cy Twombly, and Helen Frankenthaler in this chosen form of creating art.

The New York School of Abstract Expressionism had become an original American interpretation of abstract art; its followers wanted to distance themselves from the original European mold. In Mexico, a small but insistent group of artists embraced the abstract form. Diego Rivera, while in Paris at the beginning of the century, was experimenting with abstraction and cubism. The first Mexican to seriously go into it was Siqueiros, who had become friendly with Jackson Pollack while living in New York. His later “prison” works on paper owe a great deal to this period. Mexican artists visiting New York joined in. Cuevas and Felgueras also tried experimenting in abstraction, and although they returned to figurative painting, the freedom and autonomy they found in the abstract experiment left its indelible mark on their work. A perfect example of this influence is Rufino Tamayo’s “Energia,” fire wall mural (1969), which hangs in the entrance hall of the Club de Industriales in Mexico City.

Mexican artists such as Parra, Manso, Gallardo and Francisco Miranda as well as Juan Soriano, Gunther Gerzso and Enrique Climent delved deep into the abstract movement, creating important works and cementing fruitful careers. The Mexicans, much like the New York School artists before them, have made the abstract form of creating art most definitely their own, personalizing the style and content with strong influences of their Spanish/indigenous heritage, using strong color and creating light with the very baroque use of gold. Goeritz, who worked closely with the Pritzker-awarded Barragan, the father of modern Mexican architecture, created minimalist panels in layered gold leaf, and Humberto Spindola, the present-day master of folded and cut paper works of art, uses silver or gold leaf in all his work.

And this brings us to the magnificent abstract paintings by José Luís Bustamante, an exhibition with the unlikely title of “Retablos Contemporaneos Recientes,” or Recent Contemporary Retablos. Why retablos? I can only assume that much like the religious retablos of the 17th and 18th centuries, the paintings are created on canvas on a bed of carefully rendered gold leaf, and the gold applied to the canvas illuminates the carefully layered color that is then brushed onto the surface.

Bustamante creates sheer poetry. Some paintings have an almost mystical, religious quality, which again brings us to the title of the exhibition.

Bustamante’s magnificent abstractions have been greatly collected here in Mexico and in Europe, where he has lived and exhibited. His works can be found as part of important museum collections in the United States, Europe and Latin America.

Born in Mexico City in 1955, Bustamante received his art training in the prestigious San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts, and throughout his career he has had over 60 one-person exhibitions. His work has been reproduced in several magazines, catalogs and books.