Magic, myth and reality, Jan 19, 2007

Work by David Leonardo Sunday, January 21, noon Galería Atenea, Jesús 2

David Leonardo is a multifaceted artist who not only approaches pictorial works with great skill but also uses a variety of techniques, such as graphics, bronze and mixed-media sculpture. He has a natural talent for monumental works, especially murals. He recently finished two murals in the Instituto Allende, bringing to seven the number of his public artworks in the city.

Leonardo was a student of the muralists Arnold Belkin and Vlady, with whom he worked on historical murals in Nicaragua in 1987. He was also a student at La Esmeralda and the National School of Plastic Arts in Xochimilco and is studying for his master’s degree in Visual Arts in Mexico City. His thesis discusses the scope and limitations of the avant-garde Mexican mural movement.

This exhibit, titled “Magic, Myth and Reality,” draws us nearer to the divine dimension of life, a magical world full of myths and legends presented with a passionate, chromatic intensity that evokes the essential values of humanity.

The artist feels that art is also a road to the transcendence with which we face a superior truth: love in its most sublime state.

Critics consider Leonardo an outstanding representative of Mexican mural art who presents an innovative aesthetic and abstract discourse. His works are much appreciated by art collectors—among them the legendary Robert Mondavi of Napa Valley, California, and the Misrachi-Beraha group—and are found in important museums in Mexico, such as the Antiguo Palacio del Arzobispado of the Ministry of the Treasury in Mexico City.

Santiago Corral’s daily encounters
By Margaret Failoni

Works by Santiago Corral Saturday, January 27, 7pm Galeria LeNoir, Jesús 1A

Once again, we are privileged to enter into Santiago Corral’s private world, a universe not composed of major encounters, but instead of the delicious continuation of blissful domesticity.

Only an artist of Corral’s stature can turn a bathroom sink into a work of art. Self-taught, Corral is part of a family of superb artists. Over the years, he has mastered a distinct technique in realist painting. His Caravaggioesque use of light and shadows brings high drama to a simple paper bag lovingly rendered in pastels. Only Corral can make a beautiful painting from a bathroom hand towel. And what to say of the small still-life paintings relating to a steaming cup of coffee or a deliciously inviting plate of spaghetti?

In this exhibit, the artist also teases us with boxes of mouth-watering chocolates. Beautiful place settings invite us to the table. This tongue-in-cheek teasing is typical of Corral’s work. In a more reflective mood, the artist has been working on portraits of his family that will be presented later in the season, but some of them will be included in his latest catalogue accompanying this exhibit.

Something about Corral’s choice of still lifes brings to mind Zurbaran—the same ability to turn a simple fruit or object into a true work of art. But then, that’s what makes a master. 

Casa Linda holds two-day exhibit and sale

Works by Karen Wight and Mitzi Bidner Saturday & Sunday, January 20 & 21, 2–5pm Casa Linda, Mesones 101

An upcoming exhibit at Casa Linda features the wearable miniature sculptures of Karen Wight and a series of exciting and playful paintings created in San Miguel by Mitzi Bidner. Both artists have exhibited extensively and their works are in many museums as well as in private and corporate collections.

Wight’s work explores the movement and structure of the human form. She will exhibit her miniature wearable art: silver figures in yoga movements, couples embracing and spectacular gymnastic moves, to name a few. Wight will also have a one-woman show that opens at YAM Gallery, located in the Institute Allende, on February 7pm.

Bidner’s work is a series of playful and energetic pieces constructed of multiple layers of Pellon in brilliant colors and are very baroque. Her work is specially priced for this two-day event.

The artists’ websites are located at www.karenwight.com  and www.mitzibidner.com 





The mystery of landscape
By Peter Leventhal

“Paisajes Guanajuatenses”
Paintings by Margarette Dawit
Friday, January 26, 6–8pm
Espacio Jean Vigo
Fábrica la Aurora

For a civilized human being, life needs aesthetic justification. That life has but a brief appearance remains our sole fact. Even one of the first great theologians of the Christian Church, Tertullian, said: “Heaven is open to no human; only at the end of time, when the last man has left the world, will heaven open its mystery.”

Only aesthetic work constructs perfection of outward appearance—the ordering of experience into a comprehended and meaningful reality. I am listening at this moment to a Puccini aria. The aural world, too, needs an aesthetic ordering so that we may recognize the almost painful beauty of its sounds. Herein lies the clue: beauty, which always comes as a presentiment of the truth. The painted image gives us a sense of representation, and representation allows us the grace of self-recognition. 

Only the “first-born one,” the progenitor, that which shapes all the rest, needs only light. After that, we all suffer from a nostalgia we cannot recover. Only art possesses the chance to heal. The world—so various, so light, so splendid—might disappear; our vision and our aesthetic console us.

It is vile to view awful painting, meretricious and trite. It comes as a betrayal. But it is inspirational to look at superb art. No matter the corpus of great art preceding it, a contemporary vision of lucid intensity and intelligent beauty exhilarates us in a special way. It acts as a balm, an unguent for the soul.

In the masterful hands of Margarette Dawit, landscape painting opens into an ennobling series of sensations. We recognize these vistas with a reinvigorated vision. Margarette Dawit presents the beauty of the configuration of hills—their rise and fall like breaths of a great beast—the judicious subtlety of color, all the glory of appearance, with an intense and special integrity.

All this comes from a fierce commitment to the sincerity of the handling of the paint. Nothing insipid or bankrupt mars her pictures. The rectitude of application and brushwork permeates every square centimeter of the canvas. Dawit’s consummate artistry, part alchemical, part spiritual, envelopes each mark, every description, always inventive and always beautiful.

These stunning paintings, often bravura in execution, filled with audacious gesture, concentrate on a single goal: the elucidation of the physical world. They are, in a word, gorgeous. In effect, this is all we can ask of art: that it sincerely affect us, that the essential integrity of what exists be present and visible.

The exhibit runs through February 24.





Elegance and power in Ana Thiel’s new sculpture 
By Barbara Levine

“Mutabilis” Works by Ana Thiel
YAM Gallery, Instituto Allende
Ancha de San Antonio 20


The new sculptures in Ana Thiel’s exhibition, “Mutabilis” (Latin for “change” and “mutation”), which opened at YAM Gallery on January 12, immediately capture your attention. Thiel’s work for this exhibition mixes ideas about books and texts with materials found in nature, including elements that are both fluid and solid, such as water and glass, to address issues of time, the body and our relationship to the natural world. 

“Cycle” (2006), an installation on the floor in the center of the gallery, is composed of several large, misshapen curvilinear mounds of glass, some with color added. On the undersides of these flattened, rocklike shapes (they also look like thick, pulled taffy) are impressions of shells, hands, feet and other life forms. The pieces have been arranged in a loose circle and placed on top of a sand-blasted mirror. The effect is that of a shiny watery surface that begins to resemble a river flowing around you. The piece beckons you to kneel and look at the reflections in the mirror so you can see more clearly the fossilized impressions (almost like looking at a river bed). By choosing to put symbols relating to tracks of time (including embedded keys) on the bottom of the piece and reflecting them up, Thiel challenges the viewer to look closely at the fabricated swirling river and consider the clues nature leaves and what they mean as we cycle through our own lives.

When I first saw this piece, it was installed outside on the ground. The contrast between the natural and man-made elements made it especially compelling. With her decision to include this piece in this show and install it inside, one has to wonder whether Thiel is experimenting to get the mix right; I encourage viewers to visualize this installation in different settings.

Also on view are four of Thiel’s altered books, including “Untitled” (2006) about the incomprehensible design and beauty of a feather; “Isa” (2005), featuring an embedded leaf in glass that looks as if it were frozen in time; and “Echo of the Sea” (2006), an open book containing pages partially burnt and scarred from insertion of a glass seashell into the book’s interior. “Toni” (2006) is an ode to a recently deceased friend, Toni Gerez. This memory object is a book whose center has been removed and replaced with shattered glass. Encased in the glass is a beautiful seashell. The cracks in the glass, the seashell, the existing shell of the book, and the sand applied to the book’s surface seductively pull the viewer inward.

In a conversation with Ana about her use of books as sculptural forms, she said, “Sometimes we look at things so often we don’t see them anymore. I use the books as containers and as frames to express my emotions about timelessness, the beauty of life and the perfection I see in nature.” The four altered books collectively suggest that if you look hard enough, if you consider the effects of a transformative text, or the veins in a leaf frozen for all time, you will see beyond the containment of glass and book covers and perhaps discover the extraordinary in the ordinary.

On a slightly different note from the rest of the works in the exhibition is the sculpture entitled “Necklace” (2007).This giddy work spans vertically across the gallery’s largest wall and consists of oversized glass and wire bead pieces strung together, suggesting a piece of jewelry fit for a larger-than-life-sized, mythical body. The weighted cuff-shaped formations resemble bones (think spine of a dinosaur) and recall a past when ritual and extravagantly sized, earthy materials were used to adorn the body.

Thiel is an unusual artist. Well on her way to becoming an acclaimed glass artist, she chose to eschew that world and had the courage to merge her interests in glass as a symbolic and mutable element with her attraction to discarded materials and substances found in nature. Over the last five years, she has forged a more interesting path for herself, making assemblages that fuse together bits and pieces of wood, wire mesh, rusted nails, old books, seashells, rocks, tree leaves and feathers, to name a few, with glass shapes that she blows into crevices, shatters or infuses with anthropological traces. Handling her materials in the same industrial manner as handling glass, she often torches, tarnishes and scars the surfaces of her pieces, further transforming them. The effect of her fusion of materials and surfaces is surprisingly successful. 

It is challenging to make assemblage with materials and ideas about nature and books without falling into clichés about alchemy and transformation. In Thiel’s case, the parts do all add up, and she has been able, with most of her work, to transcend her materials and their overt symbolism to create original and captivating sculptures. Through her use of materials that are simultaneously fragile, mutable, enduring and endearing, Thiel’s new sculptures elegantly and powerfully compel us to reflect on our relationship to nature and consider that all forms of life leave something behind for the future. Our challenge is to follow Thiel’s lead and recognize the clues that are often right in our own backyard.

Thiel was born in Mexico City. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in Finland, Portugal, Germany, Sweden, Japan and the United States. Her sculptures are in over 20 museum collections worldwide. She has received numerous distinctions, including fellowships from the National Council for Culture and Arts in Mexico and prestigious artist residencies in Spain, Japan and the US. She has a degree in Industrial Design from the Universidad Iberoamericana, and she studied glass sculpting with Robert Wilson and Gianni Toso at the Barbini and Signoretto Factories in Murano, Italy. Ana has lived in San Miguel for the past 14 years and has a studio in colonia Guadalupe.