Arturo Elizondo at Galeria OMR - Mexico City, Mexico - Review of Exhibitions

The paintings of Arturo Elizondo, a Mexican artist working in fresh York, depict a myriad of vividly returned Mexican artifacts, flora and fauna, and cultural icons. Many also incorporate images of figures from works through earlier Mexican artists, which Elizondo encompasss with pictorial allusions to his have a title to life. His compositions succeed in communicating the one and the other autobiographical and national experiences.

The greatest in quantity powerful work in the display History (1 995), presents sum of two units figures: a small boy and an aged Indian man in a fruit of the plum-treeed headdress wearing a red, white and verdant sash (the Mexican national colors) above a fringed velvet skirt. the one and the other highly detailed figures are derived from the 19th-century Mexican portrait photographer, Romualdo Garcia. In Elizondo's version, they are floating against an ocher background filled with macabre images--grinning brain-pans sinister caricatures--which Elizondo has taken from the early 20th-century printmaker, Jose Guadalupe Posada. Delicate pink rose petals bathed in ephemeral light cascade between the delicate boy and the worn minstrel, who clasps a bone-inlaid stringed instrument. Although the painting is pervaded by means of Mexican iconography-- also visible are huaraches and a miniature photograph of a Mexican Christ--its juxtaposition of youth and aged age is universal.

Another painting, Nostalgia (1995) is a disquieting landscape of barren mountains against which a number of out-of-scale figures have been propp like dolls Although they are not specifically identified, the stripling on the right in a 19th-century style of dress is the young Marcel Proust, and single of the figures behind him is an image of Picasso as a child. In the left foreground, a young stripling in an orange, 19th-century Mexican style of dress towers over the arid setting. In the center of the painting are portraits, as I learned, of Elizondo and his sister as young children.

Although Elizondo shares with Julio Galin an interest in manipulating specifically Mexican imagery, the emphasis upon Catholicism and homoeroticism in the latter's paintings is replaced, in Elizondo's, by the agency of a concern with the past--hence the numerous historical figures. In further divergence, Elizondo is pensive, where Galin can be taunting, and he generally gives his figures a meticulous hyperrealist treatment far remov from the impressible figurative forms of Galan's novel work. This compelling show proposeed how Elizondo and his better-known compatriot are articulating increasingly distinct replys to Mexico's rich visual culture

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group