Parabolas Mexicanas | ||
 Bernardo Gonzalez, Arbor de las Regiones, (detail) 2004, oil on canvas, 39.5”x 28”  Francisco Verastegui, Tacos Contras Hamburguesas, (detail), 2008, etching on paper, 1/20, 12.5" x 12" | ||
This exhibition draws together aproximately 50 paintings, prints and drawings by Mexican artists Bernardo González and Francisco Verástegui. Parabolas Mexicanas is a vibrant collection of works that manipulate both popular and art historical symbols of Mexical culture and tradition. Union College will be hosting a series of events in connection with the exhibition including events with the artists, a film series, performance and lectures in both Fall and Winter terms. ARTISTS RECEPTION AND GALLERY TALK IMPROVISATIONAL PERFORMANCE FILM SERIES WINTER TERM:
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:Bernardo González
Bernardo González, born in the locality of Guadalupe Hidalgo Etla, state of Oaxaca (southern Mexico), in 1973 and currently living in Mexico City. González is one of a handful of Mexican artists exploring and enriching Mexican religious artistic legacies. Although Oaxaca is renowned as a center of "artesanías" (popular and indigenous art) production, the region's diverse artistic expressions mix historical, socio-cultural, and political dimensions, all of which feed off this cross-fertilization. González's art follows in the tradition of colonial baroque expressions. It updates it and recreates it, giving birth to a uniquely contemporary idiom. His exuberant, vibrant, and hybrid renderings of crowned nuns and virgins, tree of life paintings, and self-portraits present new readings of religious iconography, and reveal bodies carrying old and new chronicles from which emerge other histories and other bodies – Aztec, indigenous, contemporary, colonial, re-gendered. Straddling multiple spaces, cultures, and cultural legacies—popular and baroque Mexico, pre-Hispanic and Spanish and Mexican Catholic traditions, Gonzalez offers a refreshing engagement with religious icons and their symbolic, social, and political everydayness. His tree of life paintings reinterpret a Mexican sculptural tradition: the “árboles de la vida” are vivid Mexican artifacts with Mesoamerican and Judeo-Christian significance which mix angelic and earthly characters in animated hierarchies of beings. His work often explores and questions gender and sexual stereotypes and rigidly defined roles while employing and referring to the conventions of colonial religious art. The critic (and priest) Gualterio Hernandez has said, "González's work is of much significance because of its tenacity and color, and such is the case of his series of 'crowned nuns,' which have inspired much praise in and outside Mexico. This style is unique to a Mexican pre-Hispanic aesthetic. Color runs through the artist's veins [….] González does not recur to that which is illogical and/or exaggerated to attract attention but to an artistic expression that is as much part of his personality. We can see it in his paintings' semblances, in the faces. González is creating a new path in our [Mexican] artistic traditions…”
Francisco Verástegui
Francisco Verástegui was born and raised in Mexico City during a time of great transformation and creation, socially, politically, and artistically. He is a self-taught artist who has spent the last twenty-five years creating art that addresses issues of oppression, poverty, war, and pollution in a forceful and compelling, yet often humorous, manner. His work speaks to the fundamental truths of the human condition, exploring the relationships between consumerism and concience, history and truth, politics and lies, oppression and the potential for freedom. Verástegui’s artwork resists categorization. He works in a number of styles – sometimes loose and painterly, other times crisp and illustrative, sometimes combining linear, cartoon-like images with heavy washes of abstract color. Moreover, he produces work in a plenitude of media – drawings, prints, paintings, collage, and other mixed media. His range of styles places him outside the label-happy art market, a situation that as a self-declared revolutionary, he is quite comfortable with. In defiance of the market, he also belongs to that school of artists who reject the idea of the perfect, polished final “product” in favor of a more casual, immediate, and loosly presented artwork – rough edges, tears, blotches and all. Verástegui is passionate about speaking out; his activism permeates both his life and his art. From local issues to global politics, Verastegui uses his talents to expose injustice and hypocracy. When McDonald’s tried to open in the historic central square (zocalo) in Oaxaca, he joined with others to keep them out. In his series of “food battles” he brings this conflict to life with a highly expressive anthropomorphizing of the main characters – the food. He has been similarly active in the cause to keep the trees in the zocalo from being cut down, and to keep the jaguars in the jungles around Oaxaca. He takes up political turmoil both within Mexico and around the world, from the violence against the teachers in Oaxaca in 2005/6 to the U.S war in Iraq. Verástegui experiments with a wide range of iconic imagery to express both the economics of imperialism, and the cultural imperialism that comes with military domination by the U.S. worldwide. In addition to the iconic symbols of American culture – the cartoon characters and superheros – guns are a recurring image in his work. The connection is made: the gun that oppresses your neighbors in Oaxaca is the same gun that kills civilians in Iraq. What makes these works so appealing is that the message is not pedantic and heavy-handed, but rather offered with thoughtfulness, intelligence, and humor. Verástegui does not simply criticize or denounce, he invites us to engage and become passionate along with him.
A bi-lingual, full color catalog is available. | ||
