The artists José Luis Cuevas (1931-2017) and Manuel Felguérez (1928-2020), in addition to contemporaries and colleagues, were part of the generation of the rupture, which is why the José Luis Cuevas Museum organized the exhibition The whole and its variations As a tribute to the painter, sculptor and Zacatecan recorder.
The 52 works that make up the sample come from intimate environment
From Felguérez, that is, they are custoded pieces in his workshop located in the house he shared with his wife, Mercedes Oteyza. They were made in the last years of the artist, “more or less at the time of his exhibition Trajectories In the University Museum of Contemporary Art (2019), but they were not seen there. His style is similar to Agenda 2030large format sculpture-installed in 2018 at the United Nations headquarters in New York, ”says Jorge Reynoso Pohlenz, curator of the exhibition along with Salvador Vázquez Araujo, Manuel Alegría and Gabriela Eugenia López Torres.
These large format works are A kind of summary of several periods of Felguérez, although the exhibition also includes sculpture and graphic of other moments from more or less of the 70s
. The exhibition, however, is not organized by creative periods
. Rather, take the opportunity to Use the museum’s ships and their shots to generate visual interference in sculptures and paintings
.
Reinvention
The idea of Felguérez is that of a person who always imposed a reinvention. He was a serial painter, worked from imposing limitations in each series, although also variations. At the same time there is this common denominator that the work has to be in motion. That is not opaque, but generates a tension with the space where it is. There must always be an exploration of materials and processes
.
▲ In his work, Manuel Felguérez combined freedom and discipline, expresses the curator Jorge Reynoso Pohlenz.Photo Peláez
Regarding the concept limiting
Reynoso Pohlenz explains that Felguérez had a beginning like the play theory
. He said: ‘I’m going to take a topic or series of elements, and I will not get out of this parameter’; However, within this introduced variations.
“A famous case is the project of the Aesthetic machinein which a computer system was used for the first time in Mexico to take out the variations according to an algorithm, all in collaboration with a mathematician of the UNAM, an algorithm arising from what was supposed to be its style. And it was making a series with many variables, until suddenly the variations were exhausted and said: ‘I’m going to something else. I will combine informal, or gestural elements, with geometrism. ‘ There was this idea of combining freedom and discipline. Felguérez looked like a very intellectual and rationalist artist, but rather generated a rigor to his fantasy. ”
The museum script also includes documentary material that provides a wide range of work carried out by the artist, from a monumental scale work for public space and the scenographic collaboration with Alejandro Jodorowsky, to small -format pieces, easel. In addition to photographs, fragments of testimonial texts of Octavio Paz and Teresa del Conde are shown, among other cultural figures, which talk about their vision of the work of the Zacatecan artist.
The whole and its variationsExhibition Tribute to Manuel Felguérez, will remain open until March at the José Luis Cuevas Museum (Academy 13, Historic Center).