Collecting the art of the people
By Linda Lowery, Feb 9, 2007

They love Mexico. They love its culture and history, color and textures, its myth and its magic. They spend their time, money and energy traveling to far-off villages on buying adventures.

Yet not one of them is a Mexican national. They are relocated foreigners who own folk art galleries in San Miguel and whose lives and work are deeply rooted in all things Mexican.

Step into any one of their shops and you find yourself in a colorfully indigenous microcosm of the country. There are scarlet devil masks, candy pink muñeca dolls, barrel-sized green ceramic pineapples. Tomato gods dance on earthy amate bark paper, trees of life burst with activity, papier mâché dragons, painted in pointillist style, breathe silvery fire. It’s the villages of Guerrero and Oaxaca, Chiapas and Michoacán, Puebla and Jalisco, all in one place. 

“Foreigners are a powerful driving force behind the preservation and continuation of the Mexican indigenous arts,”says Bill LeVasseur, who, with his wife, Heidi, owns Casa de la Cuesta B & B and its newly opened mask museum, The Other Face of Mexico. “That is not to suggest that Mexicans don’t have a passion for ethnic arts,” LeVasseur adds. But as US culture has grown more homogenous, the sharp cultural diversity within Mexico is delightfully appealing to foreigners. 

“Here, big cities have vast, defined differences in dress, food and speech,” he says. In the States, the blending has created a sameness in urban communities from Pensacola to Cleveland to Sacramento. Outlying Mexican villages, where most indigenous art is created, retain even more dramatic diversity.

The staggering selection inside a folk art gallery can be a bit overwhelming. Within minutes, our senses are reeling from the abundance of milagros, ceramics, dance costumes, weavings, wooden carvings, paper toys and sculpted clay. Not to mention many unfamiliar symbols and images. More often than not, we long for a little more context. 

What’s authentic and what’s cranked out for the tourist market? Who are those cut-paper creatures in bare feet? Should we be frightened by that leering mask, horsehair jutting from its cheeks? How old is it? And are we supposed to care how old it is? We want to be enlightened. 

The art of the people

“Mexican Folk Art is the story of the Americas,” says Deb Hall, who considers customer enlightenment a key part of her job as owner of the Zócalo gallery in centro, where she and her husband Rick display and sell an extensive variety of ethnic arts.

“It is a nonverbal history—the complex world expressed in simplest art form,” says Deb.

A bona fide category of fine art, folk art, according to educators, generally falls into four categories: traditional, contemporary, mass market and outsider (prison or mental institution art). Although it takes endlessly varied forms of expression, the art is all rooted in the mythology, history and tradition of the indigenous peoples. Rick Hall explains it this way: “Folk art is organic, coming from the life and heart of the villagers. It is as integral to Mexican life as corn.”

“It is an emotional art form,” says Evita Avery, who owns a small, jam-packed tienda called La Calaca. “It is all about your home, your god and your family.” Every emotion is evident: playfulness, joy and serenity are juxtaposed with terror, sadness and frenzy. 

Artists work from their homes, often with a scarcity of materials, so “found” objects—aluminum foil, cardboard, chicken bones, marbles, animal fur—are used right along with clay, paint, thread and wood.

“Artisans may be unschooled, but not untrained,” Heidi LeVasseur points out. “They study with fathers or grandmothers, aunts or uncles or brothers.” These teachers pass on secrets—ancient mythology, symbols, forms and materials from pre-Hispanic culture—which are woven into the work. 

The cut papers of Humberto Trejo González, for example, are made of the bark of the Jonote tree, and are still used as magical objects in healing ceremonies in San Pablito, Puebla. “The paper sheets are cut to depict various Otomí spirits, both good and evil,” says Heidi, who is the exclusive distributor of Humberto’s work in San Miguel. “Petitions for a good harvest contain god figures holding such crops as mango, peanuts, coffee and tomato.” 

Tradition vs. evolution 

Humberto sometimes also creates neon-bright cuttings of palm trees, devoid of mythological symbols, untraditional pieces that are not nearly as interesting to Heidi.

This juggling act between innovation and tradition is an ongoing challenge for buyers. 

Understandably, materials evolve. Gold and silver leaf, common in the past, are now impossible for artisans to afford. Mineral powders, called anilines, have been replaced by modern paints.

But Mexican folk artisans, influenced by everything, display a stunning ability to meld religion, politics and news items into their traditional work. Sometimes the images are startlingly contemporary, depicting the fall of Saddam Hussein, for example, or the 9/11 devastation of the twin towers.

“Folk art is constantly reinventing itself, and we certainly buy the new-direction work,” says Rick Hall. “But we also commission traditional work to make sure the old techniques are continued.” 

The LeVasseurs approach folk art from the historian’s perspective: its purposes, techniques, form and content, its importance in past and contemporary civilization. “In our gallery, everything has a tie to tradition, to ceremonies and rituals of the culture,” says Heidi. 

Does age count? For those interested in antique art, perhaps, says Avery, who collects clay molds used to make papier mâché masks, all predating the1940s. But generally, it’s the quality of the piece, not its age, that counts. “When Grandes Maestros die, their art dies with them,” says Avery, so their work is bought for the quality, not simply the age.

Jennifer Haas, who runs the Museo de Arte Popular at Rancho Jaguar near Atotonilco, is a collector of every conceivable type of folk art, including outsider art, which can veer toward the eccentric and edgy.

She has a skull made of chicken bones, and clothing painted and worn by Don Eduardo Ramirez Lozano, a street artist who lived part of his life in a cave near San Miguel. 

Vintage tourist art is a favorite of Haas. Also called mass market art or “airport” art, it’s usually cranked out quickly and in large quantities. Hass finds interesting old tourist pieces in the States. Recently, in an antique shop in Maine, she picked up some Oaxacan plates that are no longer produced in Mexico.

Community interaction

Most gallery owners agree that their role is not to influence the direction of folk art, but to keep it alive and thriving. They have a broader and deeper drive to their work—all have an earnest love for Mexico—and they gain great satisfaction from helping the artists and their communities support themselves in part from authentic folk art. 

“It’s not as if I collect masks per se,” explains Bill LeVasseur. It is rather that he collects living history, spirit, the multi-faceted culture of Mexico. His mask hunting has taken him to remote villages to watch dancers recreate the dramatic stories of the Spanish Conquest, represent a petition for rain, or celebrate holidays like Easter, Carnival and Día de los Muertos.

The Halls always spend Day of the Dead in Michoacán. One year, they took 30 villagers from tiny Ocumicho on a field trip to a museum in Pátzcuaro. On display was clay work from the early to mid-1900s. A 10-year-old boy looked at a whistle shaped like a lady, and tears sprung to his eyes. “This is my great-aunt’s work,” he said, although there were no labels on items. Rick showed his appreciation for the piece. The following Day of the Dead, villagers greeted the Halls with 127 newly made, but authentically traditional, lady whistles. They bought them all.

Gallery work also touches the town’s local life. Twenty-five-year-old Susana Tovar was born and raised in San Miguel, and knew nothing about indigenous Mexican art until her German-born neighbor, Ilse Sheffield, offered to take her to meet some of the folk art masters. Once Susana met a maestro or two, she was hooked. She not only loved the art, but was astonished that it was produced in the midst of such dire poverty. “It made me proud to be Mexican,” says Susana. She now manages Sheffield’s Galería Mariposa, a bright, cheerful tienda that carries contemporary and traditional folk art.


What’s on the horizon? 

Communication has brought international images and contemporary history into the homes and minds of indigenous artists. Economic necessity drives artisans to create for the market. In the face of international trends and styles, will Mexico soon lose its traditional generational work and enchanting artistic diversity as well? 

According to the Halls, the horizon for folk art is brighter than ever: “As buyers, we are working to ensure that the older styles, colors and techniques will not be forgotten. Even though folk art is firmly rooted in the past, the creativity and innovations are constant.”

“I’m glad I’m living in Mexico today,” says Bill LeVasseur, “before the influence for economic gain and the influence of TV and electronics warps or morphs folk art into something less traditional. I hope it will always be here.”

“Mexican folk art always was and always will be,” says Haas. “It’s not going to go away. Here, it’s in the blood.”

Mask museum: the other face of Mexico 

The Other Face of Mexico Casa de la Cuesta Bed & Breakfast Cuesta de San Jose 32

Indigenous ceremonial music sets the tone from the moment the door opens to this newly opened museum, a mystical collection of over 400 masks rooted in traditional dance and pre-Hispanic ceremony. Danza masks represent images of Pharisees, Spaniards, demons, animals and death. Mannequins in full dance costumes include the Mayo Pascola (“the old man of the fiesta”) from Sonora. All displays give historical and cultural details in Spanish and in English. Upstairs is an exclusive collection from fabric, paper, milagro, toy and tin artisans, including the cut papers of Humberto Trejo Gonzalez. A focus of the museum is to inspire new generations to perpetuate authentic Mexican folk art through education. Tours are available by appointment. For more information, call 154-4324, email info@casadelacuesta.com  or visit the website at www.casadelacuesta.com. 



Folk art galleries

Zócalo
Hernández Maciás 110
152-0663
info@zocalotx.com 
www.zocalotx.com 


La Calaca
Mesones 93
152-3954
lacalacasm@hotmail.com 


Galería Mariposa
Recreo 36
152-4488
GaleriaMariposa@yahoo.com 



Museo de Arte Popular
Rancho Jaguar near Atotonilco
152-0804
loshaas@yahoo.com 

Fábrica la Aurora celebrates three-year anniversary
By Edward Swift, Part II

Anniversary celebration, Sat, Feb 10, 6–9pm Fábrica la Aurora, Calzada de la Aurora

In Part I of this article (Atención, Feb. 2, p. 21), I related some of the history of the genesis of Fábrica la Aurora as an arts and design center. After the former textile factory lay unused for a decade, Christopher Fallon, along with Merry Calderoni and Mary Rapp, rented studio space from Paco Garay, general director of La Aurora Associates. Now, there are over 35 shops, studios and galleries in Fábrica la Aurora.

Merry Calderoni

Machinery left over from the textile factory can be found in many of the galleries, workspaces and shops at Aurora. In Merry Calderoni’s gallery, there’s a working forge, a sharpener used for various kinds of machinery and a giant vise. Hanging all around these relics from the past are her vivid contemporary paintings. Her media are oil, acrylic, encaustic and found objects. Used and tattered bullfight posters sometimes find their way into her paintings. “I only use the ones that have been torn from the walls. I think bullfighters make very little money, and I don’t want to take their posters before the corrida,” she says. She also incorporates the walls of San Miguel in her paintings. “I take fragments of walls when people redo their homes and embed them in the canvas. I pound and pulverize them and mix them with gesso or paint to create a texture, and that way people really do take home a piece of San Miguel with them.” She is known for warm, earthy colors, ancient colonial walls, aged patinas and crusty la
yers with glimpses of messages from the past.

How did she get the name Merry? When she was a kid on a family vacation she and her older brother told everyone they were twins. His name is Terry, so hers naturally had to be Merry. Her father had always told her: “If you tell a lie, you have to remember it for the rest of your life,” so the name stuck. 

Calderoni lived in Venezuela for 12 years. She studied at Bellas Artes in Maracaibo and exhibited both there and in Caracas. She also studied in France and Italy, but she grew up in Odessa, Texas where there was “nothing to do except art and sports. It was a Friday Night Lights town, which means football was everything. Still is.” She turned to art at age 8, and later on she became a member of a half-time drill team organized by a “wonderful lady, far ahead of her time, named Dr. Belle Mead Home, who is still alive and creating. We performed to music with intricate choreography and bull whips.” Using the basic skills she learned in the drill team, she taught herself precision showmanship with both the 6-foot and 12-foot bull whip. She was particularly skilled at slicing a newspaper down to postage-stamp size and cutting torches and cigarettes from the mouths of her nervous assistants. This proved to be a useful skill for a young woman going to college. At the University of Texas, she helped support herself with precision whip acts that were booked by the agent Cactus Pryor. Pryor also hired her for his own act. He frequently posed as an admiral no one had every heard of and delivered humorous after-dinner speeches. Merry Calderoni posed as his wife, a Russian ballerina in exile. She pretended to speak no English, so the dinner guests felt free to say whatever they wanted around her. She lingered in the ladies rooms, collected all the gossip and reported it to Pryor, who incorporated it into his speech. 

The famous Cactus Pryor kept her very busy. He once booked her whip act for a United Nations Delegation at the LBJ ranch, and six months later in November 1963 she was scheduled to perform for JFK after his trip to Dallas. Unfortunately, that performance never took place. 

Today, Merry Calderoni rarely takes out her whips because they’re “getting so old it’s almost impossible to cut a cigarette out of someone’s mouth without removing something else.” Has she ever had an accident? “Well, I sometimes used my husband in my act. I only hit his nose once, and that was when I was drinking frozen lemonade spiked with vodka.” Only a week ago she was persuaded to demonstrate her precision whip act at a wedding in Costa Rica. She sliced a newspaper to shreds and removed a cigarette or two. No accidents have been reported, and she has now returned to her painting studio to pursue her latest fascination, the walls of Mexican pyramids. 

Mary Rapp

Mary Rapp is a painter and sculptor who was born in St Louis and has lived in San Miguel since 1990. Coming from strong Irish stock, she has a natural gift for words and a flair for the limerick. From the age of 8 she knew she was an artist.

“I was near-sighted as a bat and I think I drew to bring the world closer to me,” she remarks. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Washington University in St. Louis, the Chicago Institute, the University of Chicago and a school in Atlanta where she learned to carve with a chain saw. On her website, www.maryrapp.com, she has provided the following statement: “My work is a doorway into another level of experience ... a way of perceiving the world and my own reactions that I could not have discovered with words.”

Her life has been a series of adventures and chance meetings. While walking through a labyrinthine park in St. Louis, she turned a corner and came face to face with Lucien Carr, who would later become known as the Father of the Beats, the person responsible for introducing Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg. “We stopped dead in our tracks, and that was the beginning of a stormy relationship that lasted two years.” 

At the time, William Burroughs was still living in St. Louis, where he was born, but he was not yet writing. He was planning the perfect crime, to the amusement of Lucien, Mary, and all their friends. The planning committee met at a bar on Antique Row, where they listened to Burroughs’s elaborate schemes to rob banks. They rehearsed his theatrical plans, as if they might actually happen, and Mary Rapp was usually the designated driver of the getaway car. Had the bank heists actually been carried out, it is unlikely that we would have the grand opportunity to visit her gallery today. 

Mary Rapp never met Allan Ginsberg, but on a spring day when she and Carr were in New York, Jack Kerouac knocked on their door, looking for his girlfriend. Mary and Kerouac walked at dawn up to Columbia University. There, he played at evoking the devil by drawing pentagrams in the sand of a child’s playground. “And that,” she remembers, “is how we spent Easter Sunday.” 

Not long after that, she met her husband, Gil, a St. Louis reporter. “We met at a party given on the same night the world was introduced to Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony on radio. We were all standing around listening and drinking. Both Gil and I had come with different people, and we left with each other. It was scandalous. Four months later we were married.” 

Her husband introduced her to the work of Max Beckmann. Beckmann, in exile from Germany, came to St. Louis to teach a graduate class at Washington University. Rapp was not eligible to take Beckmann’s advanced class, so she passed herself off as an important reporter, knocked on his door and asked to study with him. The elaborate story of their relationship can be found on her website, but in a few words, she not only became Beckmann’s student, she became his model, friend and drinking partner. She had no German and he had no English, so they communicated in inadequate French. “We later joked that we communicated in Scotch.” 

Beckmann taught by giving “corrections.” He marked up her paintings with black paint, and once he pressed two wet canvases together and said, “Now we drink.” Today she says: “I think he was just trying to tell me the paintings weren’t very good.” Even after all these years she still finds herself understanding “cryptic remarks or the genius of a particular stroke of black paint that then was clouded in a mist of Scotch.”

Mary Rapp was a model for several of Beckmann’s significant paintings about women, namely “The Fisherwomen,” “Snake Charmer,” “Frau Mit Orchidee” and “Valkerie.” In “The Fisherwomen” she’s standing on the left side of the painting and holding a fish. 

Jorge Coro

Jorge Coro is one of the newer faces at La Aurora. Born in Havana, Cuba, he was once an accountant, and then a campesino. He entered the gallery business because of his family involvement in art and currently he manages the Alquimia4 Gallery at Aurora’s entrance corridor. “Alquimia” is the Spanish word for alchemy, and the number 4 is significant because four people are involved in the gallery: Jorge, his wife, Adriana, a printmaker, his mother-in-law, Lila Parrilla, considered to be one of the most important silver jewelers in Mexico, and his stepfather, Victo Hugo Nuñez.

Victor Hugo Nuñez was born in Chile but has lived in Mexico half his life. Many of his critics have called him the best expressionist sculptor in Latin America. He uses a variety of materials, including clay, bronze and various other metals along with a material he invented called Dulces Sueños (Sweet Dreams). The material is made of sugar cane and is based on an ancient compound used extensively in Michoacán. In the Basilica in Pátzcuaro there is a statue of the virgin whose face is made of a mixture of corn and orchids. Victor Hugo was given a grant from the state of Morelos to research the origin of this compound and to come up with a formula for it. For his first piece of sculpture he used a mixture of 1,000 orchid plants combined with corn cane. Not wanting to use so many orchids, he substituted them with building materials such as sealers and glues. He also substituted corn for sugar cane and added dirt and donkey manure. Through much trial and error, he arrived at his formula for Dulces Sueños. If you 
visit the Alquimia4 gallery you will see sculptures created from this unusual material. In the future the gallery will be showing Victor Hugo Nuñez sculptures that rise to a height of five meters. For this reason, the gallery has been moved to a larger space, and the space where the Alquimia4 Gallery used to be is now a bookstore, La Deriva. 

Marie Moebius and Jorge Coro are co-partners of the new bookstore that will specialize in art books. Deriva is the Spanish word for adrift. Marie Moebius explains the name by saying that they wanted a suggestion of the sea, of a drifting boat. She wants her customers to feel comfortable in the store, to drift around from corner to corner, to sit down, order a cup of coffee from the café and then drift over to another shelf of books. 

Moebius is no newcomer to bookstores or publishing. Born and educated in France, she has a diploma in Book Techniques, which means she has been schooled in the inner workings of publishing houses, bookstores and libraries. When she came to Mexico she worked as a publisher’s reader in Mexico City. On coming to San Miguel she worked at Tecolote bookstore for one year before beginning the new venture with La Deriva. 

The bookstore will specialize in books about international art, Mexican art, crafts, architecture, graphic design, fashion, cinema and illustrated books for children. 

Edward Swift is a novelist and visual artist. He shows his work at the Vandiver gallery. 

Memories of a journey through yesterday
By Melanie Harris

Works by Sarah Davis Sat, Feb 10, 5–8pm Galería/atelier, Fábrica la Aurora, Calzada de la Aurora

New York City artist Sarah Davis has found a beautiful and profound connection with nature and the everyday, which she interprets masterfully onto paper through her carefully honed artistic abilities. Her tools, the camera and pastels, so consciously juxtaposed and contradictory in nature, come together to help her communicate the essence of both the world she is viewing and the world she is feeling, in a present and past tense. 

Sarah further explains, “The demands of the snapshot and the drawing are different. The sense of observation and surveillance that is present in the photo is both subverted and enhanced in the act of drawing. The sense of watching or being watched gives way to the intimacy of touch. The picture relates something about the position and the moment the photo was taken. They are translated by hand into simple constellations of color and gesture.” A narrative of sorts is formed on the walls when these moments in time are placed side by side, in much the same way as a film does. “Some elements may be contradictory, exclusive even, but they can exist at the same time, reflecting an acute awareness of each other.”

This visual narrative has become a signature for Davis. Her love of nature and a simultaneous appreciation of both the photographic and classic arts is also prevalent in her work. Admittedly, Davis is equally inspired by the likes of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and the Barbizon school of painters as much as she is by the photographs of Eugène Cuvelier, whose work is closely associated with Corot. Unlike Corot and Cuvelier, who focused mainly on painting the French countryside, Davis’s work is not exclusive to nature. Whether a view out of a car windshield into the city or a glimpse of a Church in Morelia after her last visit to Mexico, Sarah’s work is a reminiscent, nostalgic view of our simple world that touches the visual and emotional senses of the viewer. Sarah’s work is a slightly blurred depiction of memory, where clarity exists in the grain of the paper and emotion flows from the moment and the progression of images on the wall.

The show is in conjunction with Fábrica la Aurora’s third anniversary party. 

Artistic ensemble “Lucita Inc.” show work at Biblioteca Pública

Lucita Inc. Fri, Feb 9, 7pm Galería Santa Ana, Reloj 50A

Ana Lucía Gómez, Miguel Ángel Morales and Magdiel y Angelina Pérez present their collective show, “Lucita Inc.,” which includes light pieces and wall appliqués made with various materials and techniques. The idea is to play with light and form, creating diverse atmospheres and shadows.

Echoes at YAM Gallery
By Lena Bartula

“Echoes” by Karen Wight Through March 6 YAM Gallery Instituto Allende, Ancha de San Antonio 20

Karen Wight’s one-person exhibition, “Echo” celebrates the artist’s lifelong fascination with the energy and motion of the human form: Bronze figures balance on walls and in sand, and transparent resin bodies emanate with an inner light. The room is ablaze with several images of the human figure, gymnastic bodies, feet dancing, bodies connecting. Sounds of meditative chant seeps out into the room. 


In addition to sculptures of solid bronze, Wight now includes transparent resin sculptures. “These works have energy sliding from the inside out, the inner core is reaching out and sharing its essence,” she comments. Some sculptures intentionally confuse the senses: sight becomes sound and light becomes form. Other pieces symbolize a gong with the chime striking reverently toward the heart. Miniature sculptures inside mimicking larger works outside are like dangling mallets inside a bell, constantly releasing sound in waves.

The work in her new series “Full of Yourself” is “an echoing of form reverently imitating how a chant or mantra repeats itself over and over. This series works as a ‘visual chant echoing itself’.” A hollow resin foot, titled “Echoes,” filled with golden bronze miniatures, dances between transparency and solidity, small and large, heavy and light. 

Another series, “In Balance,” is composed of detailed human forms, accenting athletic and sensual gestures. Opening a world of possibility, the sculptures have multiple fulcrums allowing for a variety of balanced positions. Placed on tall steel stands, they can sit in a bed of sand, allowing even more attitudes for balance. These forms, which allow changing positions, seem to echo the concept of Buckminster Fuller’s domes, whose multiple balance opportunities fascinate her: “Like his domes, my sculptures abandon traditional concepts of up, down, or sideways. I invite you to touch them, pick them up, play with them and know them intimately.” 

Wight has exhibited in museums and galleries in the US, France, Monaco, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Canada and Mexico and was honored with a one-person invitational exhibit last October at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles. She is presently working on a commissioned life-sized bronze fountain. 

Of dreams and sensuality 
By Michael French

“Sueños y Sensualidad”

Paintings by Fernando Fuentes

Whitfield Gallery

San Francisco 18

In 1972, I met Andrew Wyeth for the first time in South Cushing, Maine and went to his home, where he showed me a series of watercolor paintings he had recently completed. Wyeth’s watercolors are stunning. I was amazed. He is undoubtedly one of the world’s masters, and certainly the father of contemporary modern realism. His watercolors and egg tempera paintings are breathtaking in a way only the masters in art history have been able to paint. His minimalist way of eliminating all irrelevant or extraneous information in the painting and only leaving the object, the center of the focus or attention, in a bright light—much as the mannerist artists like Caravaggio did—is amazing. He was able, with great economy of brush work, to create a masterpiece of humble subjects like a log or some rocks.

When I met Fernando Fuentes a few years ago, my first impression of his work was that I hadn’t seen watercolor paintings done with so much skill since I had seen Wyeth’s. Fernando became my friend, and with time I realized that he is probably the greatest Mexican artist living today, especially in watercolors technique. Fernando Fuentes is a master painter. He studied and was influenced by the great artists: John Pike, Wyeth and his brother, Homero Fuentes Cortés, who was 12 years his senior and an accomplished artist doing architectural renderings and is a famous architect in Monterrey. He learned such techniques as dry brush and alternate wash applications, the layering of the textures and thin watercolor glazes from these men, but he is largely self-taught. He is genius in the technique.

His latest exhibition in the Whitfield gallery, one of many he has had in his life, is called “Sueños and Sensualidad” (Dreams and Sensuality), because Fernando often incorporates surrealistic elements, sometimes using trompe l’oeil, painting themes that often weave between different realities and sometimes incorporate feminine sensuality. 

One of the paintings that touched me the most is “Encuentro y Desencuentro,” in which a young man is running out of the room into another reality suffused with bright, early-morning light and a young lady is sitting at the back of the room, her head resting in the palm of her hand, looking a little forlorn. A red ribbon floats and entwines them both as he runs away. Was this her first love? Possibly her first dolor de amor? There is also a charming little dog trotting away from him in her direction. A messenger?

Fernando’s paintings make one stop and contemplate. They are fascinating and involving, inviting the viewer into their worlds to explore the different realities. They are intellectual but at the same time highly emotional and personal.

Collective show at Galería 7 Flor

A collective exhibit of paintings and ceramics opens Saturday, February 10, at Galería 7 Flor. Painters featured include Aceves Navarro, Pérez Nieto, Miguel del Valle, Celia Calderón and Pepe Padilla, among others.

Works by ceramic artists Juan de Dios Carballido, professor of ceramics at Bellas Artes, and Irmela and Yasuaki Yamasita will also be featured. 

The opening takes place from 6 to 8pm, and the exhibit will remain open until February 17.

Nine Lives
By Rosa Torres

Paintings by Folch Thur, Feb 15, 6–9pm Magenta Gallery, Umarán 32

At the age of 11, the artist Folch took his first fine art classes. Since then, painting has been his most important form of expression and the road that has guided his existence.

His studies at Esmeralda, a renowned school of painting, engraving and sculpture in Mexico City, and at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, Canada, formed the basis for what would be at first classic work full of craftsmanship and later an original and very personal contemporary language that the artist defines as “playful Expressionism.”

Folch’s paintings are populated with characters that express his anxieties, grief and happiness with a sense of humor that is at times luminous and at other times caustic and ironic.

The main character in this exhibition is the cat, an incomprehensible but beloved being to which the artist pays tribute. These allegories bring back a breath of childhood that helps us to confront our fears and desires with a smile. The vibrant and strong colors in Folch’s palette touch and mix, always leaving the viewer surprised by their intensity and audacity.

Folch affirms that art has the intriguing and exciting mission of taking him to unknown roads that allow him to discover himself continuously. Each work is a new challenge that he faces with utmost humility, opening the possibility to see beyond what the first intention dictates, allowing the work to take an unexpected direction.

Ten percent of all sales from the exhibition will be donated to the Society for the Protection of Animals (SPA), as well as 10 percent of sales of the work of Magenta members Rosa Torres, Victoria Pierce, Rebecca Peterson and Bonnie Griffith the night of the opening. 

Jordi Boldó at Mero Arte Contemporáneo 

]Paintings by Jordi Boldó Fri, Feb 9, 7pm Mero Arte Contemporáneo Zacateros 24

Jordi Boldó was born in Barcelona, Spain, and became a naturalized Mexican citizen in 1957. His work draws on his background as it combines Catalán informalism with the abstract expressionism of North America. His paintings are exploratory and lyrical, charged with emotion while emanating a mysterious and self-possessed calm. They manage to present the dichotomy of a simplicity veering toward minimalism while offering the viewer all of the visual satisfaction of rich, textured painted surfaces that demonstrate this artist’s command of color and form. Boldó believes, as his work reflects, that it is not always necessary for things to be clear, explained or formulaic; he says that “a good attitude is one that feeds off of confusion itself.” 

Boldó’s recent work is the result of a long process of reduction of his own pictorial language. Through this process of distillation, the paintings have developed a richness of texture while undergoing a paring away of form and color. For the artist, these paintings are about taking risks, getting lost and, most of all, starting over. “That is how the most valuable things are discovered, simplified images, clear and precise about what we most identify with,” he says. The body of work from his most recent collection, “Hallazgos a la Deriva” (Discoveries Adrift), was born from this new start, in search of new discoveries.

Boldó has been working in the medium of oil paint since adolescence, and he says that he cannot imagine doing anything else. His artistic life has been a dedication to the pictorial possibilities of paint by way of a personal language expressed on canvas. He has enjoyed a long and productive career as a painter and has to his credit a long list of exhibitions in some of the most important galleries and museums in Mexico as well as in other countries. As well as painting, he now devotes part of his time to promoting cultural events as well as teaching painting. 

Dynamism, spirituality and strength

Paintings by Dima Karabchievsky

Sat, Feb 9, 6pm

Casa de las Artesanías de Michoacán

Calzada de la Aurora 29

“I feel that my work derives from French post-Impressionism and the Expressionists Kokoshka, Nolde and Munch,” comments Dima Karabchievsky, an eccentric Russian painter born in Russia who has lived the last 16 years in the US. 

“I begin by working from the essence—it could be a landscape or a person—and derive inspiration from everything around me; I am especially motivated by the challenge of subordinating chaos and presenting it within a harmonic scene.” 

A show of the painter’s work opens Saturday, February 9, at at 6pm at Casa de las Artesanías de Michoacán, Calzada de la Aurora 29. The show will remain open until February 19.

Photo exhibit of Asian sex workers at Indigo

“Disposable Boys” by Mark Sriker 

Sat, Feb 9, 7pm

Galería Indigo, Mesones 76

Galería Indigo hosts a visually powerful and provocative exhibition of photographs of gay sex workers in the sex tourism industry of southeastern Asia. Photographer Mark Sriker captures the faces and stories of the young gay men who service sex tourists in Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam with sensitivity.