For sure, Mexico City is on our go-there-again-before-we-die list.
Named the top cultural destination in the world last year by Time Out, it’s being compared to Paris in the 20s, New York in the 80s and Berlin two decades ago.
Take, for example, MAM, the Museo de Arte Moderno. (We didn’t know that it’s one of the continent’s preeminent contemporary art institutions.) You may not like its Brutalist exterior but inside the three exhibitions we saw were each worth sharing in separate blogs.
Let’s start with Vicente Rojo—painter, sculptor, graphic designer and publisher—a Mexican modernist known for his contributions to the Generación de la Ruptura or the Breakaway Generation. Vincente was a central figure of this artistic renewal in Mexico and Latin America, although the group preferred to call themselves the Generación de la Aperutra or the Open Generation. There’s was a movement away from figurative and nationalistic art (like Diego Rivera’s) to art expressing personal freedom and introspection, art emanating colour and light, art focusing on the individual rather than the collective.
If modern culture in Mexico could be distilled into a single style, it would be the style of Vicente Rojo.
This high praise came from Cuauhtémoc Medina, a chief curator at another of Mexico City’s cultural institutions, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo.
Vicente was born in Barcelona in 1932. In fear for his life under Franco’s regime, Vicente’s republican father fled to exile in Mexico during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The family wasn’t reunited until Vicente was seventeen years old and they emigrated to Mexico.
From the age of four, Vicente knew he wanted to be an artist. He studied drawing, sculpture and ceramics in Spain. In Mexico, he attended the prestigious Esmeralda National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving and befriended his favourite teacher, the typographer Miguel Prieto, a fellow Spaniard.
The pivotal point was when Miguel hired Vicente to be his assistant in his publishing firm. The job led Vicente to fall in love with “visual democracy”, giving equal importance to lettering, colours, paper and images. While continuing his abstract painting on the side, Vicente collaborated on projects with great writers and poets, his art on the covers of books by Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz, and in magazines, newspapers and periodicals, on album covers and more.
Look what first gained him public notoriety and ensured his legacy as an artist—his design for the first-edition cover of Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) by Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, considered one of the 100 best books of all time.
But it was Vicente’s paintings that the four of us gravitated toward at the retrospective of his work at MAM.
(This exhibition was planned to coincide with the celebration of his 90th birthday on March 15, 2022, but sadly Vicente died the previous year.)
“Vicente Rojo: The destruction of Order” refers to his process, “in which freedom of creation means breaking with the previous and established order to build a new one.” (Odd title for such orderly art, isn’t it?)
The emphasis of the exhibition was “on the moment in which he turned his creative work from the figurative to the geometric. This happened during 1964, a sabbatical year in which he settled in Barcelona to rethink his production, thus changing his style to one that is usually related to American pop art, and which resulted in his first geometric works,” writes the exhibition’s curator, Pilar Garcia.
Do you see Pop Art in his work? (I’m more inclined to see similarities to Agnes Martin’s line drawings.) But I found an explanation: Vicente’s placement of paintings together with books and mirrors “paid homage to the artists of the transition from abstract art to Pop Art’s negotiation with objectuality: Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Jasper Johns.”
After his sabbatical, Vicente began painting 10 to 15 canvases at a time in a series. In Signals (1965-1970) he worked with basic geometric shapes like the letter T. In Negations (1971-1975) his intent was that each painting negate the previous one and the one that would follow. In Memories (1976-1980) he dealt with putting his war-torn childhood behind him (In addition to his father’s sudden exile, his brother was a leader in the Republican resistance against Franco). The series Mexico Under the Rain (1981-1989) was conceived when he saw a downpour and became obsessed with trying to recapture the emotion of the experience. And Scenarios (1990 until 2021) was a summation. However, the exhibition of paintings, sculptures and books wasn’t organized chronologically. Instead, it was displayed under four themes that, collectively, were the inspiration for his art: War and humanism; Language; Systems Geometry and Memory.
Language – the Letter T
Systems Geometry – Cambio
Recuerdo
Paseo de San Juan
Señales en el país de Alicia
Mexico Under the Rain
In the words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
Vicente distinguished himself from the rest of the gang by a monastic austerity, by the few forceful words from him, by a rare nonconformity that did not have peace. It was not easy to relate the complexity of him to the geometric purity of his paintings, where sky blue, invisible whites, and yellow rolled in spaces so polished that even the paper on which they were painted seemed to be metal, predominated. That is to say: both the painter in his life, and his paintings in his, seemed tamed by a modesty that insisted on exploding and could not find where.
Yes, MAM, we felt like our heads were exploding with the elemental force of Vincente’s paintings…until we went downstairs…but that’s a story for another day.
Navigation
Abelleyra, Angélica. “Vicente Rojo Work Fashioned of Mystery.” UNAM.
Gutierrez, Vicente. “Art. The MAM presents an exhibition by Vicente Rojo.” Milenio. August 12, 2022.
Lancaster, Pau. “Inside Mexico City’s Meteoric Rise to Art World Capitol.” ArtMarket. Febraury 6, 2024.
Mistry, Elizabeth. “Vicente Rojo, Renaissance man of 20th-century Mexican culture, has died, aged 89.” The Art Newspaper.
Multiple authors.” Vicente Rojo: Printed Painted”. MUAC · Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM. 2015.
