In season: An interview with Ignacio Urquiza
By Sam Decker March 7, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Art Opening
En Temporada / In Season
Ignacio Urquiza
Fri, Mar 7, 6–8pm
Museo del Ayuntamiento
Plaza Principal

With a tendency towards authenticity and a drive for innovation, Ignacio Urquiza has made a long career out of capturing the world’s best cuisine.

With over 30 years’ experience as a professional food photographer, he has collaborated on dozens of books and countless magazine articles, focusing not only on gastronomy, but also on the surrounding cultures—the hands that create the food and the mouths that enjoy it. In his exhibition at the Museo del Ayuntamiento, Urquiza attempts to share his appreciation for the diversity and beauty of the ingredients we use to make the food that we love. His subjects are grocery items you thought you knew—bananas, corn, asparagus—but his unique perspective and obvious obsession allows you to see through the eyes of an artist who has stayed up more nights thinking about food than anyone you’ll ever meet.

Sam Decker: What is unique about food photography?

Ignacio Urquiza: A photograph doesn’t have a third dimension and it doesn’t smell and it doesn’t taste. You have to communicate taste, flavor and texture to your spectator. That is very difficult. I think that you cannot be a food photographer without also being a cook. 

SD: Do you cook?

IU: Yes. I love to cook. If you don’t have the culture of food you just don’t understand how to communicate it. You can tell immediately when a photographer loves food.

SD: Do you ever photograph your own creations?

IU: (Laughs) I want to start photographing my own recipes soon. You will hear about it.

SD: What is it about photographing food that inspires you?

IU: I think my imagination captures me. My imagination starts working in the morning and then I have to go and shoot whatever comes into my mind. It’s something very obsessive. Almost always it is food because I work with food professionally everyday. I am always connected with food.

SD: How has the transition from film to digital changed your life as a professional photographer?

IU: The first thing is that I go to sleep in peace (laughs). Before, all night long I would wonder if the shots from that day came out or not. You could not see the results. That is one big, big thing. With digital I see the results right away and then I can relax and go to a movie or something.

SD: Are you typically as happy with the results when you use digital equipment?

IU: Now yes. It took about four years to become convinced. I was really against it. Now it can be very powerful. It’s a gift to the photographers, absolutely. Except now there is so much more competition. Photographers came out of everywhere. Right now there are 70 million photographers using their cellular phones as cameras. Now that everyone is a photographer it’s important to have your own language. It’s a challenge. Like with music, you have to find a tune that is original.

SD: Tell me about your exhibit in San Miguel.

IU: Throughout the entire week I deal with food in one aspect or another. If I am not photographing it I am cooking it. The designs of the ingredients that we use are so incredible yet we rarely stop to really look at them. It has become an obsession of mine. I wake up in the morning thinking about how can I show an ingredient in a different way. How I can share my respect for the design of the ingredients and to nature, God or whoever creates these things. So I started shooting nuts. Walnuts. Close-ups. And I was amazed by what I saw in the camera. I found all kinds of shapes and textures that were incredible when I got close to them. Then I moved on to asparagus and then to bananas. I started looking at these ingredients in entirely new ways and that’s what I want to share. 

SD: I would imagine that to be able to produce the photos that you do would require extremely controlled environments. Is this true?

IU: I love natural light. Most of the images in this exhibition are natural light. But I also use studio lighting. We make sets when we need them. But if possible we go to location—kitchens, markets or whatever. I love to shoot on location, though it requires more skills because you have to deal with natural light combined with artificial light. And there are always surprises. Very early in the morning I let myself go. I do meditation in which I imagine the scenes and I just let go. And things happen. Incredible things happen when you just let yourself go to the power of the universe. 

SD: Do you use ever use fake food?

IU: We use little tricks but not much. Food stylists take care of that. Different oils are used sometimes to make things shine in certain ways. We used to use fake food but not anymore. Everyday we try to go more with what’s real. I was just shooting in Tokyo and Kyoto for Sabor magazine. All the restaurants there display plastic food on their shelves to show what they serve inside. It’s a lot of fun. There were markets and factories making and selling these products. Every kind of sushi you can imagine. I took a lot of photos of those.

SD: You have worked on many books about food. Which one has meant the most to you? 

IU: Probably The Taste of Mexico (1986). Patricia Quintana, the author, and I set out to give a new face to Mexican food that was almost nonexistent before. It was known by oral transmission and by painters’ depictions. Making the book was a challenge, a responsibility and an opportunity. We traveled throughout the whole country for nine months, looking for patterns and shapes. This was a beginning for me. Afterwards I became very passionate about Mexican food.

SD: Which country’s food is the most photogenic?

IU: Japanese or Thai. Mexican food is very difficult to shoot. Tortas, tacos, enchiladas, mole, anything you can think of. We cover a lot of our food with dark sauces, which makes it difficult to capture. With fusion in the United States, France, Spain, Mexico, food has become so visual. The chefs are taking care of the visual aspects that I had to take care of before. In a way in makes my job easier. But also there are more photographers (laughs).

Sam Decker is a recent graduate of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. He is currently interning in the editorial department at Atención.

Australian artist at Guanajuato museum
By Judith Jaffé

Art Exhibit
The Desert and the Inland Sea
Christine Gates
Mar 6–April 3
Museo del Pueblo de Guanajuato

With his perspicacious eye for the avant-garde, the director of Museo del Pueblo de Guanajuato, Arq. Francisco Javier Pichardo Gómez procures world-class artists.

The Museo, itself an artistic tribute to colonial architecture, is permanent home to acclaimed Mexican artists, including muralist José Chavez Morado.

For the first time, Gómez has discovered Australian Dreamtime entwined in contemporary art. For the first time, the Museo presents a new body of work by Australian artist Christine Gates. Mexico and Australia—dry desert lands steeped in memories and mysteries evoke longings and sanctity; yearnings that will continue through time.

“The Desert and the Inland Sea” is an exhibition that expresses the artist’s affinity with explorers of land and sea; of space and spirit.

 Like brave sixteenth-century seafarers sailing towards the edge of the known world, Gates breaks new artistic ground. She integrates traditional etching and relief printing techniques with digital manipulation and photopolymer gravure plates. She fuses the physical with the spiritual in layered visual works. Microcosmic photographs of crystals with digital processes bring to life what Gates terms “other worldly elements—partly realistic, partly created.”

The boat is used as a symbol of hope and exploration. It is a boat adrift in a sea of light; a boat sculpture among rippling rocks, a skeleton boat in a dreamlike plan—it represents the universal and the specific elements of the journeys of the explorer of Australia’s interior waterways, Captain Charles Sturt’s. Like indigenous custodians, Gates trusts the intuitive over the controlled. Into Heartland (C-type digital print on Fuji Crystal Archive Matte paper) uses ambiguous perspectives inviting the viewer’s interpretation.

Gates’ greatest achievement in this body of work is light. It glows and glimmers. It illuminates and intensifies. It is magnificent and meaningful. Explosive and ephemeral. Powerful light—it can take the viewer by surprise.

To communicate the surrealism of Sturt’s dream and the magic realism that exists in desert landscapes is Gates’ aim. Her duty: to respect the sacred and the dreamlike.

Was it Captain Sturt’s quest for Fame, as he quotes, when he wanted to be the first man in the 1840s to “set foot in the centre of the blank map of Australia” that steered him? Or was it a sense of Fantasy, as Gates extrapolates, that urged him to cross a desert of sand and stones? 

In Waves of Stone (photopolymer gravure intaglio print on Fabriano Tiepolo rag paper), Sturt peers into the heart of the interior seeing “waves of the sea in endless succession.”

Sturt failed to find an inland sea, failed to touch the center. But he was touched by mystery and magic when he contemplated the “vast heart of the interior” that hung as a “veil that could be neither pierced nor raised.”

Sturt’s dream is layered with collaged images by Gates to reveal the poetic sensibility that silently underpinned Sturt’s endeavour.

Gates sees life as a journey of the physical and spiritual. She has travelled across the continents and oceans of the planet. She sees and learns. She borrows and records. She discovers and creates. Her artworks sensitively layer the world of humans, of nature, her vision and those before her. With subtlety and insight Gates evokes and provokes. Her work permits glimpses into inner recesses. Urged by color, design, layered images, manipulations and creativity that mystify and inspire, the viewer also takes the journey.

Go with Gates and Sturt to the vast continent of Australia, the birthplace of Aboriginal dreamtime. Black velvet night skies aglow with secrets and remnants of stories and rich, red desert landscapes have spawned myths and mirrored mysteries. Gates has succeeded in transforming symbols and metaphors. She has entered the dreamtime and shared that energy with us in this exhibition.

Judith Jaffé is a freelance writer from Australia sojourning in San Miguel while completing her first children’s book.

Exploring the beauty of simplicity
By Yasuaki Yamashita

Art Opening
Yasuaki Yamashita
Thu, Mar 20, 5–7pm
Gallery Ar & Ar
Fábrica la Aurora

Throughout the centuries, ceramicists have strived to produce works of simple form but with individual character and unique creativity.

To transform the clay, that is to say “bring the clay to life,” it is necessary to explore the infinite possibilities of many forms, but form must not be remote or detached from daily life. The ceramicist Yasuaki Yamashita continues to explore the creative possibilities of form and beauty. A selection of his recent works will be presented at the Gallery Ar & Ar from March 20 to April 30. 

Art & Architecture success story
By Margaret Failoni

Open House Art Exhibition
Fri, Mar 14, 6–9pm
San Luis 4 (located off Calzada de la Presa)
Barrio del Obraje

Ever since the January 16 opening of the Art & Architecture exhibit in architect Lis Bisgaard’s new project of presenting an art exhibition in a newly built house, interest in this project has continued to mount. And as imitation is the best form of flattery, two new houses by different architects have followed suit, exhibiting both art and furniture in specifically designed rooms.

What is interesting about Bisgaard’s project is the additional artists who have joined the first group, all top notch in the world of contemporary art in Mexico. As word spread, a few artists had to be turned down due to lack of space. Such art galleries as the Florencia Riestra and the Galeria Bu very kindly collaborated.

The house/exhibition space is open to the public through the end of March, Monday–Friday, noon–4pm. The idea is to see the house at night, with its superb lighting and to appreciate the art including the new additions, under a different presentation.

On the monkey bars of color
By Douglas Max Utter

Art Exhibition
Daily, 11am–6pm, thru Mar 16
RaLuz Gallery
Posada de San Francisco
Plaza Principal 2


Every painting is a balancing act performed on the monkey bars of color and composition. Equally, each is assembled puzzle-like from bits and pieces of an artist’s life. In Harriet Moore Ballard’s complex, richly layered paintings, art and life float together.

Ballard lived for extended periods in Istanbul and London, and these days divides each year between Cleveland and San Miguel. Hints of these places merge on her surfaces. The influences of Ben Nicholson, George Braque, Henri Matisse and synthetic cubism are sometimes visible along with a general concern for modernist values.

The paintings and collages on view include a little bit of many things, from grid-like passages that resemble checkerboards to a sudden loose geometric form unfolding like a jack-in-the-box. Some views have the bright sun and deep shade of a Mexican afternoon as gourd-like shapes linger along the margins of an eternal present.

Despite their evocations of far-flung climes, most of Ballard’s work seems set indoors or on a terrace, more views with a room than the reverse, since a deep interiority is their most constant element.

Nomadic spirit grows roots
By Muriel Rincón

Art Opening
Sat, Mar 15, 7–9pm
Corazón Gitano
Hernández Macías 96

According to many traditions, the first year of existence is very important because it is the time for growing and development. With the help of strength and faith, it is a time when dreams come into being. This dream is named Corazón Gitano (Gypsy Heart), created by mother and daughter Graciela and Jade Arroyo. The store had a rough beginning, but it endured, eventually rising to success thanks to the effort and energy of its owners.

Corazón Gitano is a store as well as a gallery, with a little bit here and there. The antiques, paintings, embroideries, weavings and books are all a part of its soul.

We celebrate this first year anniversary with a collective exhibition of the expressionist art of Enrique Ortega, Marcia Webster (Abrosimova), Antonio Lopez Vega and Javier García. Graciela Arroyo’s jewelry, made of sterling and gold, is organic and free-spirited, but at the same time powerful and compelling. Jade Muriel’s magic boxes are inspired by dreams and fantasies. Their individual detail and charm makes each one seem like a tiny individual world.

Three artists, three cultures

Open Studio
Joan Elena Goldberg, Lino Arteaga, Ana Maria Munoz
Fri–Sun, March 7–9, 10am–6pm
San Antonio Abad 36

Just a five-minute downhill jaunt from the Jardín is the pleasant neighborhood of West Centro and Barrio San Juan de Dios. Here in this harmonious cross section of town and people is where artists Joan Elena Goldberg and Lino Arteaga have lived, worked and taught ceramics classes for the last five years.

“Once we got the 300-kilo gas kiln up to the third floor, everything else has seemed like a delicious breeze,” chuckles Goldberg, who completed her master’s degree in ceramics at Instituto Allende in 2002. Recently returned from a trip to the US where one of her pieces was included in a prestigious national juried exhibition of ceramic sculpture, Goldberg describes her new work: “I can’t deny that hormones and emotional flutterings have been steering the content of my latest series of wall-hung pieces. Both the human torsos and the narrative-themed masks are an uncensored glimpse into my most intimate thoughts about everything from love and sex to unadulterated rage at the world.”

Lino Arteaga, a San Miguel native mostly self-taught, has a strong and unique voice in ceramic sculpture and painting. His creations and color palette refer instinctively to his Mexican roots. “Using red clay as a form of expression becomes something very personal that absorbs me totally in time and space. Combining colored slips with colored glazes produces showy results. Written expressions in English and Spanish cover some surfaces of my pieces and speak to personal feelings.”

Included in this exhibition is a newcomer to San Miguel, Chilean ceramic artist Ana Maria Munoz. Her beautiful functional work, bowls, cups, teapots, flower vases and bottles are decorated in an earthy palette and are influenced by the organic forms of the mountainous region of Tepoztlan, where this lyrical body of work was created.

Take the walk and visit three fascinating artists this weekend, between Umarán and Arboles. For directions, 152-3844 or www.joanelenagoldberg.com. 

Encaustic: First-century technique in the twenty-first century
By Erika Corral and Michelle Wey

Art Opening
Eschwan Winding
Sat, Mar 8, 7pm
Mero Arte Contemporaneo 
Zacateros 24, 154-8580

Aside from an innate talent and superb mastery of her medium, one of the most inspiring things when contemplating Eschwan Winding’s work, is that one can see a personal relationship between the artist and her medium, a past reflected in her work, a history, both collective and personal.

The encaustic medium suits the creative spirit of this wonderful artist who is not afraid to let go of knowing, of having control of the process or its outcome. Encaustic painting is a difficult medium to master and it very much lends itself to an intuitive and tactile process. This is part of the magic that comes across in Winding’s work, through her talented hands; The result: a rich, fluid and almost three-dimensional painting that moves beyond the mundane and the predictable. No medium reflects this concept better then encaustic, as Winding states, “Layer after layer is applied, scraped, incised, fused and marked to allow the truth of the piece to speak. The revealed layers whisper their subtle messages. New layers may veil the original image and take the work to a deeper, more subconscious state.”

The ancient technique of encaustic can be traced back to the first century AD in the writings of the Roman historian Pliny. Encaustic is beeswax and resin-supported paint that is liquefied on a heated palette. It is applied by brush or other tools to wood panels.

Each layer is heat-fused to an underlying layer to fuse the paint into an enamel-like finish. The word “encaustic” comes from Greek and means to burn in, which refers to the process of fusing the paint. Encaustic is perhaps the most beautiful of all artists’ paints and is as versatile as any twentieth-century medium. It can be polished to a high gloss, molded, sculpted, textured and combined with collage materials. 

Encaustic is also the most durable of an artist’s paint. Beeswax is impervious to moisture and will not deteriorate, yellow, or darken. Encaustic paintings do not have to be varnished or protected by glass.

In her newest paintings, Winding continues her ongoing love affair with her chosen medium. The resulting works are richer and more mesmerizing than ever. They are a culmination of years of experience combined with an openness to the dynamic relationship between the artist and her medium. She does not try to control the outcome. She is living and learning by way of a very honest approach to the creative process and she is obviously very much in favor of beauty. These newest paintings are truly dazzling in their expression of confidence, positive energy and beauty.

Written with paint
By Mira Silverman

Art Opening
Micheline Montgomery
Fri, Mar 7, 6pm
Molinos de Viento
Mesones 79

There in those great little moments in life when the yellow sun rays stream through the window in the morning or when we catch the eyes of a stranger, share a smile and something clicks in us—a feeling of calm, a respite from analysis, a fleeting sense of the unity of all things.

Art, as an expression of the moments and emotions in our lives, has the capacity to capture those moments, the subtlety and poignancy, in a way words often cannot. Micheline Montgomery, in her series of works “Written with Paint” does just that. Using paint as a medium to communicate where language fails us, she lets her work establish a dialogue with the viewer without words limiting the experience: “It’s not necessary to analyze it but just look and respond with your heart and go on living perhaps a little better for it.”

As Montgomery describes her work, “I would like my work to inspire people to see the joy and beauty life presents to us. The path might not always be smooth, but there is always a little bit of sunshine hiding somewhere. We have to discover how to remove the clouds. And sometimes, art might help.” Montgomery, who is also a practicing nurse, has witnessed a lot of suffering as well as the importance of care and compassion. Her artwork serves as a means of expressing what she has seen and as a way of communicating the shades of love nursing has taught her. Despite all the suffering in life, she has found a way, through her art, to explore that moment when simple ordinary moments reveal life’s full beauty.

Montgomery has shown her work all across her native Canada as well as in Ireland, Yugoslavia and France. This is her first show in San Miguel, and we are happy to have her as a guest artist at Molinos de Viento.

Join us to share in one extraordinary woman’s attempt to transform life’s beautiful, quiet moments and its painful complexities into peaceful and meaningful works of art.

Mira Silverman is a jeweler, artist, writer and anthropologist. She is one of the co-founders of the Molinos de Viento artists’ collective.

Contemporary art at its best

Art Opening
Jorge de la Fuente, Julian Fedorak
Thu, Mar 13, 6–9pm
Rainbow of Art Gallery
Ancha de San Antonio 3

Rainbow of Art Gallery will be featuring two remarkable contemporary artists in March: Jorge de la Fuente and Julian Fedorak. Dramatic contemporary works by both artists grace the walls of many of San Miguel’s beautiful homes.

Jorge de la Fuente does fantastic representative paintings with a touch of Dali. His imaginative and complex symbolic imagery flows from his personal vision. Enigmatic and haunting, de la Fuente’s work submerges the viewer into the mysterious depths of the subconscious. De la Fuente’s paintings have been widely exhibited and collected in Mexico, Spain and New York. His paintings have the ability to stir the imagination and create communication between the viewer and the work itself.

Julian Fedorak is a long-time San Miguel favorite who has been collected from Canada to New York to Europe. His paintings in oil are bold, strong, colorful, with an unusual approach to contemporary architectural and floral painting. His work is expressive. “I interpret that which is before me with fresh vibrant colors. I am not restrained by established form. Everything I paint is an original color expression of my personal experience,” he says.

You can meet the artists and order a commission if you have a particular color scheme or theme in mind for your home. You could also order a mural. As a bonus, there will be a drawing for a small painting.

Rainbow of Art Gallery is located across the street and a few doors north of Instituto Allende, and upstairs above Santa Clara ice cream, (415) 110-3200.

Enjoy “san kyu” art
By Akiko Yasuda

Art Exhibition
Muchas gracias de mucha gente
Sun, Mar 9, 1–3pm (Jardín), 3:30–6pm (Plaza Cívica)
Free and open to the public

March 9 is Thank You Art Day. In Japanese “3” is “san” and “9” is “kyu” which sounds like “thank you” in English. Last year there were more than 150 special art activities around the world on this day (see www.39art.com ). We will hold the first-ever in Mexico Thank You Art Day (Muchas gracias de mucha gente) on March 9.

I received many ideas and wonderful messages of support because of the Atención article of February 22. This day will help us celebrate art along with many other art activities around the world. Thank you so much for giving me ideas for the coordination, the materials, public space and volunteer participation.

The purpose for the participants is to bring many ideas of “Thank You.” We will have one table with the art project and a sign announcing the activity. The staff will have aprons filled with many colors of tissue paper. Each person will pick a piece of colored tissue paper and can create whatever shape they wish to put on the board. You can write anything, cut, create a shape and through that example, you will be expressing “thank you.”

Contact me at MartesArtes@gmail.com  with any questions.