Agustín Arteaga / Enrique Franco Calvo
From the book Armando Zesatti: Arte y naturaleza. 2002
The analysis of Armando Zesatti’s work encourages us to bring several issues in contemporary art to the table. The first has to do with the problem of art understood as a system for copying reality. Here one might ask: why, after having gone through—and still living through—the experience of photography and video, and all digital and plasma systems, do we continue to value and consume orthodox artistic products—basically oil on canvas—that aspire to copy images of reality faithfully? But behind the answer to this general question, we might ask more specifically: at what level of appearance does Armando Zesatti’s work operate, which, although supported by photographic models, manages to purify the composition in an effort to be more faithful to its model?
The fact that art is always current and proposes both ancient and novel matters to help us recognize reality and become aware of it leads us, in the case of this artist, to try to understand the world through an image of the world itself. Zesatti’s work invites us to reflect on it through nature’s small and iterative manifestations. Certainly, observing nature and capturing it carefully became a tradition among traveler-painters and painter-scientists, and in nineteenth-century France it motivated a group of landscape painters to establish a critical distance from urban life—and they did so not only through their artistic creation, but also as true activists in presenting the Forest of Fontainebleau. Yet it was perhaps their pictorial labor that contributed most to reflecting on the countryside and nature, and the risks of their loss.
Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Armando Zesatti’s work leads the observer down paths of philosophical discussion and into the field of environmental conservation. Just as the Mexican School sought to serve social causes such as class struggle, Zesatti’s work promotes concerns in favor of preserving the world’s natural equilibrium. Moreover, Zesatti represents a new type of artist with new values in terms of his attitude toward the world in which he operates—very different from the romantic idea of artists in the nineteenth century, which, even well into the twentieth, we still often found in Mexico.
Agustín Arteaga / Enrique Franco Calvo
Electronic Dialogue with a Hyper
Living artist’s books can become visionary if one has the artist within reach and can share a voice with him. This does not mean that what the artist says about his work will be what determines everything for those who approach it, but his opinions undoubtedly reveal his way of seeing the world and transcribing it into his work.
For this reason, in this chapter it has seemed pertinent to us to share responsibility for certain judgments with Armando Zesatti, so that the reader may enter, with a touch of complicity, into the world of his painting. Outside the conventional interview, we wanted to carry out here a singular exercise: Enrique Franco Calvo asked a question, which Zesatti answered, and Agustín Arteaga commented on the question and, principally, the answer. Zesatti did not read Agustín Arteaga’s comment until the publication of this book dedicated to his work. We believe this exercise makes it possible to articulate a text of dialogical counterpoints that will provide three perceptions and approaches to the artist’s work.
Communication was established electronically. Armando Zesatti currently resides in Mexico City, Enrique Franco Calvo lives in El Tule, Oaxaca, and Agustín Arteaga resides in Miami, United States.
ENRIQUE FRANCO CALVO: Although your work suggests that you are always strolling through places of abundant vegetation, I know, however, that you are a man of the city; so what world does your painting belong to?
ARMANDO ZESATTI: I am a man of the city because I was born in it; nevertheless, I think my work reflects a bit more where I would like to be—places where I find forms, textures, and colors that mean something to me aesthetically and vitally.
(AGUSTÍN ARTEAGA: This answer reminds me of certain expressions by artists and intellectuals who have spoken of a feeling of exile or detachment. The creator seems to be a being always outside the place where he “really” would like to be. In personal terms, the contemporary artist lacks rootedness; there is a need—almost inherent to the condition of being a creator—for displacement. This implies being in another place that is not one’s own in search of a dialogue, which may be open or closed: open when, upon confronting another cultural group, exchange is necessary in order to identify codes and establish new ones; and closed—the introspective dialogue one sustains with oneself when language, customs, or the environment are foreign. There reflection occurs, the search for answers, nostalgia, the act of being surprised, and the opportunity to miss what one has left behind.)**
EFC: Your work seems to want to express the need to turn our eyes toward another part of the real world—not the immediate one, the city—as if you were trying to tell us that something is being lost. Do you think you sacrifice your plastic proposal for a philosophical message?
AZ: In any case, it is about the possibility of including signs. Thus, the order of description, the very procedure, acquires particular importance. For example, I think that for a while photography displaced painting, and for painting to remain alive it became abstract. Possibly this has to do with the impossibility of seeing a non-figurative painting with a gaze limited to passively receiving. Perhaps this is also why many people lost interest in it, arguing that they did not understand it. Today hyperrealism tries to challenge photography. In my case, I intend to do so with highly elaborate compositions, so as to create a work that, starting from an identifiable form familiar to the viewer, can go beyond appearances and move the observer to enter into everything that image of reality entails.
(AA: Many times throughout history, but especially in the second half of the twentieth century, painting has been declared suddenly dead or subject to spasmodic agonies, and in the same way it has been credited with just as many resurrections. It should be clarified that the establishment of Abstract Expressionism in New York after World War II implied a displacement of the “center”—until then located in Paris—and the creation of “another periphery,” establishing a new language that highlighted the expressive values of painting-as-painting by disconnecting it from rhetoric and narrative—associated with Soviet socialist realism—but in no way implied the death of painting. Now, in the helical pendular movement (which turns but does not return to its point of origin, instead ascending), it does not strike me as strange that in the twenty-first century pictorial practice has as one of its principal concerns—at least as observed in Mexico—figuration. Today there is again a current of thought that insists on starting from painting well, from the craft. But what I find very important, and what I can draw from Zesatti’s comment, is that this painting is not as obvious as it appears. Certainly, it is the possibility of creating a copy of reality, but in order to produce other effects that awaken questions—effects that “create anguish, surprise, anger, humor.” By this I mean that the artist trusts that his paintings will be seen as instruments to modify states of mind, not simply as objects of transaction or decoration.)**
EFC: How do you mentally plan a work?
AZ: Sometimes I have the idea and I go out to look for it; I don’t wait for it to come to me. I register it mentally and then face the blank canvas. Other times I simply go out with the camera and come across something that moves me, and I photograph a complete sequence. The sequence has a particular visual style, supported by static counterpoint, to keep the object in front of or to one side. In general, there is always an object in the foreground, seen frontally, up close, and with light and shadow, so that at certain moments it can align with the viewer’s gaze so that, suddenly, he finds himself enveloped by the painting, and at other times remains outside it. But both the search and the finding are located in my aesthetic perception, which is what makes it possible for something to communicate with me and move me to transmit it artistically.
AA: Zesatti—like Plato once believed—illustrates the idea that everything is in the world and it is possible to go out and meet it. I have always had the impression, I tell myself, that whatever occurs to me—fact or thing, probability or certainty—already is or has been in the world… Zesatti can lead us here through the labyrinth of paths that fork. That is, if one does not have an idea, it is better to go out and find one. What we call luck, chance, or destiny may be surrounded by so many possibilities that begin with simple facts: either I search or I find. What happens, then, with a painting that is the result of a search or of a finding? The question is not idle, because it takes us to the plane of decisions. What we already know with certainty is that Zesatti does not seek an image of anguish (on the contrary, his result tends more toward an apparently complacent image), but anguish is present when we trace back to the genesis of the work: are they searches or findings? What—or who—determines that choice? The artist?
EFC: Does it concern you that your painting might resemble that of other artists, or do you feel it comes from the contemporary tradition of appropriation and recycling?
AZ: It is not about finding that the minimal elements of signification represented in artists’ works make one approach another, or cause one to converge with another in a common place. I admire many artists and, of course, the hyperrealists, but I am definitely convinced that in painting it is about mechanisms of signification, about each artist’s style; that is why I do not think, and it does not interest me, to suppose that my painting resembles that of any other artist.
AA: We now say, almost as a cliché, that art comes from art. In Zesatti this is clear and decisive: he is not interested in his painting resembling anyone’s; nonetheless, we cannot detach it from natural associations—from Claudio Bravo or the new naturalists led by Tomás Sánchez—which can lead us to several reflections. One, perhaps the most important, is that the principle that guided art history until the end of the nineteenth century was that of “supposed originality.” Given the circulation of images and information we live with today, the phenomenon observed since the invention of the printing press—reproduction, appropriation, and alteration—has multiplied infinitely. No one should care about that historical cult of geniuses, clarifying that geniuses exist—few, but they exist. To be precise: cult figures have historically served to mark moments, but also to eclipse panoramic appreciation; they are the tip of the iceberg, the Zeitgeist, what can be seen from a distance but that hides the substrate that supports it—the generations of which they form a part.)**
EFC: Do you consider yourself modern, taking the term as something belonging to your time?
AZ: While realism is somewhat classical, I do consider myself a modern artist—perhaps based on other factors such as format, theme, compositions, colors, and so on.
(AA: Outside dictionary definitions, I would say that the classical is that which remains because it has proven its usefulness—its capacity to endure. Zesatti—perhaps out of modesty—hesitates and tells us, in a very colloquial expression, that realism is “somewhat” classical. At this point, and based on what I have seen of his work, I think Zesatti is not a realist painter. To define him more specifically, I dare to use another term: Zesatti is an idealist painter; that is, he grounds the production of his works in the gestation of an idea that he searches for or that finds him; but also—and this is important—how real is the reality he paints? Undoubtedly nature will always be more striking than artifice, but why do we experience, before Zesatti’s paintings, that we are facing a part of it, or at least its recreation? Because his model is not his own; it is part of our collective imaginary of the idea of what reality is (given that we do not spend our lives observing mangroves, banana trees, or coconut trees in the tiniest detail). Even more, it alludes to what human beings in general would like to be: an observing, conscious, responsible entity in relation to its environment. But this is an appropriated reality—first by the eye through a camera’s viewfinder, then by the printed image, and finally by the artist’s interpretation of that image.)**
EFC: What do you think viewers perceive in your work?
AZ: Peace, tranquility, the beauty of the everyday, the importance of small details, among other things.
AA: Here it could be said that Zesatti seeks an active viewer—one who finishes painting a painting, or sculpting a sculpture, or activating an installation. Zesatti’s work poses a disjunction: either one likes it or one does not. His market is, as far as I understand, very promising, which speaks of a group of people who have liked his work and consumed it. While the market can live on mirages, what is basic to extract is that his work competes with that of other no less talented artists of his age, and he holds a certain advantage over them by portraying “those small details,” since he starts from widely recognizable codes and distances himself from cryptic or violent languages, also frequent in contemporary visual arts.)**
EFC: What does landscape mean to you?
AZ: I do not consider that my work can be treated as landscape. For me, landscape is an open space—perhaps that—with a visually attractive nature, calm and welcoming.
(AA: Zesatti once again tries to be simple in his assertions. But if we were to bring together several of his works with the same theme—like the plant series—we would slowly form a great landscape painting out of his small details. Zesatti has not needed to paint an open space in order to describe landscape. We cannot help but understand that he has been slowly constructing a great painting. He reminds me of a Mexican abstract artist, Guillermo Zapfe, who claimed he was always painting a single painting. Likewise Zesatti, who has felt an obsession with certain themes and has developed them in such a way that, perhaps without intending it, he has tried to exhaust certain aspects of the visual field he analyzes; although his series of palms are seen from countless angles, some paintings can be very similar, which means that his impulse tries to carry him toward a total recognition of his theme.)**
EFC: Do you already know what the next stage of your painting will be about?
AZ: I would like to move a bit away from the theme I have been working on for some time now; however, I do not want to detach myself entirely from themes related to it. I want to synthesize different facets of the richness the environment offers—perhaps give more importance to water or to the sky.
(AA: The obsession with recognizing certain aspects of the visual environment he analyzes has not ended. I look at one of his paintings as I write these lines. It shows aquatic lilies with flowers of an intense pastel color. They contrast, as Teresa del Conde has very aptly pointed out, thanks to the young artist’s skill in handling color. Without knowing why, I understand that the subject of the painting has very little to do with nature: it is a painting that aspires to philosophize, though precisely because everyone considers it evident and because it pleases easily, it is viewed with a certain suspicion. But current codes do not foster appreciation of the aesthetic object; more than that, they even disqualify such a category. In many cases the artist turns to materials that could naturally be considered repulsive, such as animal viscera or animals themselves (in the first case we find Yolanda Gutiérrez with her poetic and seductive flowers made with pig intestines; in the second, María Fernanda Cardozo with her Dancing Frogs). Nonetheless, these productions are delightful and in some cases even sympathetic in their irony. Yet the approach to the work is conceptual despite its aestheticizing properties.)
EFC: What does the art market mean to you?
AZ: The process of creating a work is not limited to its author. As a cultural product, it is immersed in an apparatus whose strategies revolve around galleries, the public, and so on.
The pictorial work, as a cultural object, is subject to norms, and like any marketable product, it arises from the hope of profit. The art market helps achieve an equilibrium by also creating collective interest, disseminating and fostering taste; I believe that without it it would be impossible for any artist to make a living.
(AA: This is probably the answer we would like to hear from anyone who lives from their work, but as a natural deformation we continue with the romantic stereotype of the bohemian artist—misunderstood, unknown, abused—inculcated by literature, television, and cinema, which have taught us that the artist must starve or should not expect remuneration for their work. The myth of the romantic artist hits its head against these phrases by Zesatti: the artist as a special being who produces a divine object beyond valuation. Practically speaking, some will think that the market being as necessary as life itself could be blasphemy. What happens is that we face a new type of artist: one trained in a profession and who develops in it actively and seriously and, therefore, expects adequate remuneration. It is a type of artist that had already been glimpsed decades ago—perhaps germinating in Mexico in the Generation of the Rupture in the 1950s—and that comes to modify an entire system we believed governed by certainties.)
EFC: What would be the ideal exhibition you would like to do—that is, with which of your works?
AZ: Between us, I would love an exhibition with the cutouts; however, I think that is already history and is a bit outside the current context of my work and of this book. Excluding the cutouts, I would think of two exhibitions: one with all those obsessive paintings where I saturate with the same element, and another with the best plant paintings.
(AA: This conversation has served as a reference for approaching the artist. Now let us speak of his means of expression—painting—which undoubtedly says in itself much more than the words one can write about it.)
Art and Nature
What is the end of painting: to represent what is as it is, or what appears as it appears?
Is it an imitation of appearance, or of reality? No, but a phantom.
Plato, The Republic, or On Justice.
For the specialist, when looking at Zesatti’s paintings one problem cannot go unnoticed—a problem that reaches back to the roots of the West: the relationship between art and reality, or art and nature. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that at this stage of our era—that is, at a time that has seen postmodernisms come and go and in which the deaths of art have been declared—the problem of nature as a model for artists remains as alive as it was in Plato’s time.
But not only specialists: the public that is just beginning to engage with the practices of the visual arts, when faced with works proposed in the manner of Zesatti’s, discovers with great ease that there is a seduction, a fascination, in seeing something that seems like a copy of reality.
The inventions and mechanisms that exist to copy reality have reached limits the inventors of photography never imagined. It is enough to go down the list of products offering plasma-screen systems, DVD effects, not forgetting virtual reality, to realize how overwhelming the human longing and desire still is to achieve the most faithful copy possible. And yet we cannot fail to recognize that human creativity continues to generate products that speak to the coherence of living in a natural world by seeking to exalt it or celebrate it, even as, as human beings, we grow ever more distant from that concrete world.
The means we have relied upon to define what is real have proven limited. Philosophy, which has striven to reach satisfactory definitions, and science, which has labored to copy, have shown us the limitations we have as human beings in inhabiting the universe. Let me explain: at the beginning of this century, some of humanity’s discoveries have had to do with how we recognize ourselves. For example, our visual field allows us to observe only a spectrum of light and, therefore, only one scene of the world. Another example: our capacity to see and touch the macrocosm and the microcosm is extremely reduced. And we will say nothing about sound, still less about taste: at this point, given the pollution in the great capitals, those senses—taste and hearing—appear atrophied in all their inhabitants, who at times no longer perceive the stench in the air, nor the excess of pesticides and preservatives in food, much less recognize natural sounds.
It is precisely here, at this threshold of our perception, that art has managed to tell human beings a series of things that could be seen as denunciation or as philosophy. An art of today that copies reality cannot be seen as anything other than critical art. But what is the basis of this critique?
Let us remember that, in modern thought, it was the artists of the nineteenth century who sought to observe nature with “scientific eyes,” but at the same time were those who believed themselves possessed by visionary forces. On the one hand, there was the accursed artist, the one who succumbed under a tragic fate in his desire to be a faithful interpreter of reality: the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists, who linked the real world to the fantastic through a decadent vision and lived within a world of passions that much literature has tried to explain and that need not be repeated here. On the other hand, poets and writers alike practiced art criticism, while the Impressionists tried to recreate the effects of light in order to capture a reality that afflicted their era. But each era transforms reality and, therefore, the perceptions of it, as well as the way of evoking it aesthetically. If in the nineteenth century the Barbizon school established a critical distance from urban life and metropolitan modernity, arguing for a return to nature, it is not strange that there are now artists like Zesatti who seek to transcribe for the viewer the small forms in which nature manifests itself, emphasizing—through synecdoches—its vital meaning for urban societies, before which he thus establishes a critical perspective.
Art and Ecology
Our investigations begin from the assumption that the work of art stands beside nature as an autonomous organism, equivalent to it, and, in its deepest being, without connection to it—if by nature one understands the visible surface of things. The beautiful in nature must by no means be considered a condition of the work of art, although it has apparently become, in the course of evolution, a valuable factor in it, in part almost identical with it.
Worringer, Abstraction and Nature.
Art has been one of the instruments historically used to make us take a position within the world we live in. In Mexico, from Mesoamerican cultures, through evangelizing colonial art, and on to the celebrated muralism and, indeed, the Mexican School itself, art has served as an instrument of a mental definition through which to create its environment of origin. In the last example, that environment was seen as one of class struggle and the consolidation of an idea of nation; those of us who have seen works from those movements are obliged to understand, at the very least, that the world was divided into exploiters and exploited—even if we cannot expound on the differences among the political ideologies of Villa or Zapata, much less correctly identify the characters in Diego Rivera’s mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central, painted in the now-demolished Hotel del Prado.
However, when art has been used as a means of creating ecological awareness, that relationship can involve errors—let us call them tautological. That is, you cannot fight fire with fire, and that is precisely what the most advanced artists stopped doing. Art, as a form of knowledge, subjects the artist to a process of observation in order to be brought into being, and thus to understand the lines along which it should proceed.
Ecology requires understanding how nature’s mechanism works so as not to interfere with it. Unlike other organisms, human beings have refused to cohabit the world as the natural animals they are. In their singular condition as Homo sapiens—that is, without Latin: the human being who thinks, or who knows he exists—human beings discover that their animal condition does not suit them or satisfy them and begin to alter the nature around them; but they do not modify their environment superficially—they make it artificial.
Let us say that among the advantages of the human being who thinks is having created art. And that may be one of the reasons it would be worth saving our species. The human being who thinks creates poetry, comes to understand that nature creates rhythms and cycles, and transforms them into codes that celebrate life in its most contrasting aspects: construction, destruction.
It is increasingly common to realize that people who inhabit large cities have forgotten—or do not know—the most elementary forms of nature. At the risk of provoking laughter, we will say that there are those who confuse a cow with a donkey, reeds with canes, or those who ignore that a great number of pharmaceuticals are obtained from plants. Not everything is synthetic.
Thus, the awakening of awareness on the part of artists with an ecological vocation becomes one of the possibilities modern human beings have for not falling into the prison of the artificial, of appearance without spiritual value. And in pointing to the spiritual, it is inevitable—readers will understand—that plastic expression cannot be nourished by a world that is nothing but its surroundings; that is, it must be nourished by the real world.
That attitude—the artist copying (mimesis, the Greeks wrote)—led Socrates to banish poets from his ideal republic. In antiquity, artists—an altogether modern concept, in any case—could not resist trying to make in their works faithful models of reality. Why should the modern human being stop trying?
Zesatti, Mexican Artist of Landscape and Still Lifes
Form is suspended before the gaze as an object; whatever one does, it is a scandal. Splendid, it appears outdated; anarchic, it is asocial; particular in relation to time or to people, in any case it is solitude.
Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero.
The artist uses his strength to satisfy base needs; in an apparently artistic manner he offers impure content, attracts weak elements to himself, continually mixes them with harmful ones, deceives men and collaborates in their self-deception, convincing everyone that they thirst spiritually and can quench that thirst at a pure source. Such works do not elevate the movement upward but arrest it, delay progressive elements, and spread pestilence around them.
Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
The two quotations that open this chapter allow us to raise a series of questions concerning Zesatti’s work that require a very broad field of discussion.
Let us recall that one of the genres practiced by a large number of Mexican artists—and others who have visited our land—has been landscape painting. Local figures such as José María Velasco; artists rooted here, such as the Italian Eugenio Landesio; and traveling foreigners like Edouard Pingret and Daniel Thomas Egerton, among other names, were all captivated by our geographic diversity. This genre, which we call par excellence, constitutes one of the spaces where our vegetation, fauna, and human types have found a complicity between art and science. The itinerant painters of the nineteenth century often moved out of scientific interest, in many cases accompanying expeditions—such as those of Alexander von Humboldt—or acting as a consequence of them, seeking to capture in images what texts described with human astonishment and scientific detachment.
In the case of Armando Zesatti, it seems that our natural landscape has proven to be the richest source of images that his production has taken as its model. In this constant concern with nature and its relationship to humankind—found repeatedly from Mesoamerican painting through the nineteenth century—significant changes occurred over the course of the last century. On the one hand, we can say that the panorama became broader, though not necessarily more refined. Landscape painting ceased to be seen solely as a “grand genre”—as in the cases of Joaquín Clausell or José María Velasco and, above all, Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl) or Luis Nishizawa—and became, in the hands of others—such as Irma Palacios, Manuela Generalli, Francisco Aceves, or Roberto Parodi—an element of composition whose results are also extraordinary, though conceptually different. These latter artists begin from a real setting, appropriating it in order to extract the concrete from it and transform it into something else, something belonging to the creator. Some of their works preserve a relationship to landscape through the words that name them, others through the presence of references associated with nature, but all are filtered in the process of realization by a conceptual or poetic spirit.
We may think that such changes were gestated early on, composed of very diverse factors related to demographic explosion, social and political phenomena, and, of course, the emergence of critical consciousnesses responding to specific times and places. The stability sought after a decade of internal struggle began to bear fruit in the 1940s; more than the rest of the country, Mexico City was transformed—along with its inhabitants—and it was here that the evolution toward a contemporary art was primarily forged.
After the Second World War, the world was different, and in Mexico a renewal of thought took place that would set the course for our political and social development. During the 1950s, more than at any other moment in the history of art in Mexico, discourses multiplied and individuality was reinforced for the benefit of the collective. The present moment of 2002 carries an inertia that is difficult to understand without reviewing the past.
It must be remembered that, in considering twentieth-century Mexican art, we must think of two major apparatuses—accepting that any generalization is risky. Before 1950, we find a socializing, pamphleteering art marked by the Mexican Revolution, an art used by the very entity it criticizes: the State. After 1950, discourses are liberated to such a degree that today contemporary art remains almost incomprehensible to the broader society when it does not deal with modes of representation to which it is accustomed—painting, sculpture, printmaking. Its cryptic and ironic language, and its distancing from the factual and aesthetic concerns of the traditional art object, make it an object of cult in which new initiatory rituals are required to access the group of the “initiated.” Beyond irony, the incomprehension between society and art becomes nearly total. This situation is heightened when other unfamiliar modes appear on our scene—installation, video, or new electronic forms—which enter into tension with those traditional languages we mentioned. Art has never ceased to be both a result and a reflection of its context, nor has it ever ceased to be a critical tool.
One may then ask: what values does Armando Zesatti’s work observe, and in what sense does its critical attitude insert it within the currents of contemporary art? Before answering, we must identify the protagonists of this story.
A Look at the Recent Panorama
Armando Zesatti’s presence within the national visual arts scene is not an isolated phenomenon. His work coexists in galleries alongside that of other artists who express themselves from different—and undoubtedly divergent—angles. Armando Zesatti is situated within the tendency known as hyperrealism, due to his intention to recreate reality with extreme detail, magnifying the possibilities of deceiving the eye, of creating a trap that provokes questioning between model and work, and which of the two is the original. It is evident that within this category he has carved out a space of his own—distinct and relevant—in which the use of photography as an initial approach becomes the vehicle for subtraction—or rather, appropriation—of that reality which will later be returned, exalted, on the canvas.
Seen closely, however, what truly unites one hyperrealist with another—beyond the intended effect—is the use of technique and materials, and little else. The poetics of artists are individual, and within this current there are as many variants as there are artists. Consider, for example, Rafael Cauduro, who unquestionably leads this tendency. It can be said of him that his painting seeks more to provoke the illusion of the unreal than to copy what could in fact be reality through complicated technical resources, as seen in his famous brick walls or his tzompantli of human skulls.
The generations that developed their painting in Mexico during the latter third of the twentieth century sought a concept, an identity, a concrete relationship with the world. The Mexican School was not mistaken—according to its detractors—since it did not take long for images and attitudes of the muralists to be renewed. It should be noted, however, that convergences or continuities with the Mexican School occurred throughout the entire century. In some cases, there were coincidences in nationalist concerns, as with Enrique Guzmán or Julio Galán. Nor should we forget the rebellious attitude, since artists have generally sought to break established norms.
Moreover, the generation known as Los Grupos in the 1980s began from a similar attitude to that of the muralists: joining forces to confront plastic situations where political or social concerns were triggers. At the same time, they sought to incorporate elements of everyday life into their works. The artists of Los Grupos were not distinguished for dedicating themselves to painting; rather, printmaking, written discourse, questioning painting-as-painting itself, and the pursuit of conceptual art became their standards. This was demonstrated by Grupo Suma, led by Ricardo Rocha; Proceso Pentágono, which included Felipe Ehrenberg and Carlos Aguirre; and Peyote y la Compañía, where Enrique Guzmán, Adolfo Patiño, and Carla Rippey coincided, among others.
One of the deans of this movement, Adolfo Patiño, has stated that painting was one of the paths of continuity within Mexican artistic practice in the 1980s as the movement of Los Grupos began to wane, and that the techniques they experimented with—printmaking, assemblage, graffiti, and photography—have yet to reach consensus within the history and market of Mexican art. Thus, many of the former critics of painting-as-painting returned to it or used it as a vehicle for expression.
It is worth adding that Esteban Azamar, Javier de la Garza, and Nahum B. Zenil, individually or collectively, were also creating another way of being Mexican. They began exploring homophilia and the mythological interior of our identity, offering new contributions that were previously denied within a repressive society—one that was nonetheless rapidly evolving.
Hyperrealism and Landscape in Mexican Art
Lessing experienced the world with anger and with laughter, and anger and laughter are partisan by nature. Therefore, Lessing could not—or did not wish to—judge a work of art “in itself,” independently of its effect on the world, and thus he was able to attack or defend in his polemics according to how the public judged the matter at hand, largely regardless of its degree of truth or falsity.
—Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times
It seems that throughout the history of art there have always been artists who sought to make copies of reality in order to astonish unsuspecting viewers. Since Greek antiquity, there have been anecdotes of painted windows that appeared to open onto landscapes, of bunches of grapes capable of deceiving hungry birds, of sculptures so “perfect” that they were commanded to walk. In short, stories and legends of wagers to see who could copy reality “better.”
Jorge Luis Borges tells a story about a country of geographers who, in their pursuit of exactitude, create a map of the city that ultimately becomes the city itself. In another of his marvelous tales, he recounts how a group of friends decides to record human activity, which leads them first to preserve a selection of writings and finally to understand that they would have to preserve every human product.
Thus, humanity has felt a fascination with capturing a portion of reality in order to preserve it, study it, or simply marvel at the skill involved in portraying it. However, as has already been noted elsewhere, reality has not always been the same, nor has the way in which it has been copied.
In Mexico, the history of hyperrealism has been practically nonexistent. If we understand hyperrealism as the artist’s capacity to copy, with luxurious detail, the appearance of some fragment of the world, we quickly realize that painters working in this style in our country have been very few.
The history of Mexican painting is rich in styles and tendencies that coexist within the same period. Early attempts at trompe-l’œil painting are actually quite late in our artistic timeline. Some nineteenth-century artists, academic or otherwise, produced outstanding works; it is inevitable to mention Agustín Arrieta, whose still lifes masterfully render glass and water, and Hermenegildo Bustos, even today a precursor of an avant-garde aesthetic.
In the latter, it is worth highlighting his manner of reproducing, with absolute fidelity—often on a miniature scale—severe and cruel portraits that neither conceal nor soften the ravages and accidents of the skin, while simultaneously revealing the psychology of the sitter. His still lifes compose severe orthogonal patterns in which various fruits are arranged, gravitating within their perfect description.
Well into the twentieth century, we find the cases of the brothers Emilio and Ben-Hur Baz Viaud, who deserve remembrance, as they—like Bustos—share, or perhaps anticipate, characteristics later associated with Claudio Bravo, the Chilean painter whose work is recognized as the epitome of hyperrealism, even though his full relevance did not emerge until the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Returning to our point, it was not until the final third of the last century that Mexican artists influenced—above all—by American hyperrealists began producing work that sought to achieve the most faithful possible copy of reality. But let us not anticipate the part of the story that most concerns us. Although Mexican art has not had a strong hyperrealist tradition, it does have a lineage of artists who, through plastic mastery and technical skill, sought to bear witness to what their eyes observed at a given moment. A significant case is José María Velasco, about whom notable pages have been written.
When one observes Velasco’s work, one cannot help but say that he was an artist who sought to capture the greatest possible expanse with his gaze. A careful look at his paintings reveals a level at which details dissolve into brief brushstrokes. Yet seen from a distance, any of his landscapes offers—if not a photographic effect—at least a sense of portrayed “reality.” What does this portrayed reality mean? An image we know to be faithful to its model.
Zesatti’s painting seeks extreme fidelity to its model, but unlike Velasco, he does not want that fidelity to come at the expense of composition; rather, he alters it in order, from his point of view, to bring it closer to perfection.
Now, the search for reality expressed through art with “scientific” foundations found one of its strongest bastions in the French Impressionists. As we recall, they were concerned with the effects of light and its decomposition to create images, atmospheres, and a series of elements in plastic art that would be absurd to summarize here. It suffices to say that in Mexico, Joaquín Clausell’s creative temperament expressed itself in landscape in a highly personal manner. Anyone who has observed a substantial group of his works realizes that brushstroke or color patch functions as an element that, when added to all others in the work, produces a visual totality—that is, an image in the sense that a perfectly distinguishable form appears.
Nevertheless, despite pillars such as Clausell and Velasco, the tradition of landscape painters in our country does not seem to have been sufficient stimulus, and today we can say that although most artists have painted some landscape work, they have not generated a sustained current. At the risk of making a categorical statement, we dare say that the other great Mexican landscape painter was the celebrated Doctor Atl, Gerardo Murillo. He poured his emotion into every work and identified himself with each landscape and each volcano he portrayed.
We have said that the history of painting in Mexico includes notable isolated works centered on landscape. In the twentieth century, we find authors of the so-called Mexican School who developed careers nourished by the inertia triggered by Rivera or Siqueiros. We see cases such as José Chávez Morado or Manuel Echauri, who produced landscape work still viewed through a social lens that gradually ceased to interest newer generations.
The second half of the twentieth century was, in many respects, the confirmation of collective human projects, but also the moment when ideologies—after apparent consolidation—began to collapse. The old scheme of capitalism versus socialism ceased to function as an explanation of reality. Human beings revealed themselves as complex entities whose futures cannot easily be programmed. Social structures as basic as family relationships, modes of dress, sexual relations and their expression, language, racial frameworks, and more underwent rupture.
Yet amid this apparent social differentiation—which has, in part, always existed—there emerged a middle class that created stereotypes. Such standardizations allowed common projects, student mobilizations, the direction of fashion’s effects, and above all, the creation of prototypical images for youth.
But the Mexican School continued to exert influence on subsequent generations. One such influence came through Carlos Orozco Romero and two of his disciples, Gilberto Aceves Navarro and Roberto Donís. Aceves Navarro—a singular personality within Mexican art whose teaching shaped several generations, including Los Grupos and younger artists—played a key role. Donís, for his part, initiated in Oaxaca during the 1970s a movement that would generate what may be called the Oaxacan current by the end of the century.
It is interesting to note that after these generations, and despite particular compositions, young abstract painters returned to figuration, such as Óscar Ratto and Luis Argudín, to cite just two cases. Few now attempt to create art whose sole value is technique per se, though a brilliant exception may be the abstract painter Alfonso Mena Pacheco.
Claudia Fernández, Irma Palacios, Alejandro Arango, Rafael Cauduro, Dulce María Núñez, Gabriel Macotela, Miguel Ángel Alamilla, Helio Montiel, Sergio Hernández, Roberto Parodi, Luciano Spanó, Germán Venegas, the prematurely deceased Jesús Urbieta, Renato González, and Roberto Cortázar are artists whose heels are already being nipped by more recent generations, such as Daniel Lezama and Rosendo Pérez Pinacho, among many others who currently enjoy a flourishing period of exhibitions and dissemination. These artists have already assumed the role of the artist as professional rather than romantic—though the former is a social attitude and the latter an existential one, as we have insisted elsewhere in this book.
Ecology, Consciousness, and Nationalism
One of the Mexican artists who succeeded in transforming every figurative element in his paintings into a symbol was the artist from Guadalajara, Manuel González Serrano. He became obsessed with several themes, among them landscape, which he managed to transform into worlds of dream and nightmare. Added to this is an aspect that proves particularly interesting: he also succeeded in imprinting his painting with “identity.” A work such as The Sea (1950) is not merely a landscape, but the vision of a world that is not real. It is a personal reality, as noted by his most consistent scholar, Ricardo Pérez Escamilla. Although it is a world of fantasy, it manages to specify the Mexican landscape of hills and plains, dust clouds and salt seas of El Bajío.
Another artist who dreamed fantastic worlds was Julio Castellanos, and one must recall his painting Mayan Hut (Bohío maya, 1942). This work is fundamental within the tradition of Mexican culture, as it transforms a dreamlike world into a vast space populated by an infinity of elements.
We cite González Serrano and Castellanos because we believe their painting serves particularly well as a contrast to that of Zesatti. Their work portrays an imagined reality that reflected values of their time, such as identity and dream, whereas Zesatti, at the opposite pole, has not sought to dream but rather to emphasize wakefulness, entering into direct contact with daylight and light itself. Here another interesting question arises: why can the painting of this young artist also make us dream?
The distinction between dreamlike painting and realist painting may prove of limited use, since both—inasmuch as they constitute artifice and a skill that alters their relationship to the world depending on how they are viewed—are activities that disrupt established orders and seek to reach the limits of every direction that frames them.
For this reason, two cases worth recalling are those of Georgina Quintana and Roberto Turnbull. While Quintana paints and recreates reality, making painting a work rich in mental nuances, Turnbull exploits vision itself and sets out into the world so that his eyes may determine which existing object can or cannot serve to construct his work. Let us be clear: both artists, seen as extremes of the same activity, nevertheless demonstrate a shared attitude—that of creating different meanings within the language they employ. Zesatti once again becomes a divergent point; his formulation moves toward an attitude in which, in his painting, the world must resemble the world more closely. And this, naturally, is yet another way of seeking a limit.
Art history does not obey rules that allow us to imagine systematic evolutions or changes. As we know, unlike science, it is measured by other mechanisms, by other vectors that break with the logic to which we are accustomed. Thus we can observe young authors, such as Guillermo Brockmann, proposing work that reclaims elements once valued by the French Impressionists, now updated and operating within contemporary contextual possibilities such as postmodernism. This is likely also the case of Gelsen Gas, who appeared in the 1980s with a hyperrealist proposal that remains relevant today.
Painting in Mexico is full of nuances and surprises. Alongside works by Angelina Beloff, Luis Covarrubias, Luis García Guerrero, and Jorge Cázares Campos—recognized for both their technical skill and their plastic proposals, as well as for a lush lyricism—we find the variants offered by Rafael Cauduro or Ismael Vargas. These two, somewhat younger, and Zesatti closer to them, share a kind of obsession with deciphering the language of reality through the illusion of reality itself.
Rafael Cauduro and Gelsen Gas could be considered the most faithful representatives of one variant of Mexican hyperrealism. Both employ whatever visual elements may serve to create an illusion of reality. In his later work, Gas seemed, in this extreme attitude, to attempt the incorporation of extrapictorial tools—such as glass—in order to view an even more convincing reality through them.
Ismael Vargas, without being a hyperrealist, succeeds in turning his painting into a kind of multiple gaze that hypnotizes the viewer. The same image is seen at such different scales and temporalities that, faced with our inability to perceive a “systematic” order, we are brought into direct contact with something primordial in our species—an instant before human beings became obscured by reason and logic. In the early stages of his pictorial practice, Zesatti produced work closely related to that of Vargas; over time, he moved away from that style and navigated toward increasingly personal and mature concerns in his still lifes, close-ups, and landscapes.
These pages have sought only to raise a series of concerns and problematics that may prompt broader reflection based on the work of this young artist, who is rapidly projecting himself within the panorama of Mexican painting. We wish to emphasize that there is no easy artistic object, no innocent artistic object; there are mental problems, as Leonardo said when referring to painting.
Agustín Arteaga
A Question of Definitions: By Way of a Colophon
In order to approach the works of Armando Zesatti, we consider it necessary to define the sense for which they were created, intuiting it from their reading and from the generalized effect they provoke in the viewer. We may think of Zesatti’s painting as a vehicle through which we access the particular interpretation of “his reality,” which reveals—as shown in the interview conducted with Enrique Franco, and as anyone who knows him personally may observe—a calm personality, a scrutinizing gaze that seeks to find the essence of things through detailed and aseptic representation.
This latter objective—aseptic—must be taken into account from the outset, since within realist painting (or its hyperrealist variant, to which Zesatti belongs) there exist alternatives ranging from emotional appropriation to cold, speculative visual dissection. Armando Zesatti participates in this practice, which grants the work an extension of an unreal moment, real only while it existed and was mechanically captured, then transferred to the studio where a careful, almost surgical process recomposes it into its impassive beauty.
We stated earlier that the binomial reality–realism has enjoyed an apparent continuity traceable to the philosophers of classical Greece—from Platonic idealism to Aristotelian realism. Nevertheless, the concepts of “copy” and “representation” diverge into as many alternatives as there have been artists since the Renaissance. The “realist” gaze of Mannerism—as a ennobled copy of reality—is not the same as that morally exalted by Neoclassicism, since represented reality is always an appropriation and an appreciation particular to the artist.
Michelangelo’s criticisms of Flemish painters for their “crudeness” are well known; unlike his own work, he argued, theirs did not “elevate” the model but represented it in its human condition. Thus, Zesatti’s saturated images, filled with color, speak of what he lives. One might think that the full, enlarged forms occupying nearly the entire canvas ironically seek to account for the spiritual emptiness of contemporary humanity, isolated by itself in polluted cities saturated with concrete and billboards.
Yet it is undoubtedly the gaze of a contemporary man who replaces the visual contamination of advertisements, neon lights, and digital projections with the isolated and reduced contemplation of a fragment of landscape—perhaps unconsciously longed for. The serene solitude of his images carries a critical sense of what has been lost in terms of existential quality: the loss of individual contemplation and of the time required to reflect upon our individual and collective existence.
If the use of a plain language—mimesis—is the clearest and most direct means for the viewer’s reading, whether trained or common, what then occurs today that leads to the banalization of realism, depriving it of the values of “contribution” or “evolution” attributed to the development of art? We may think that what occurs is that the drive for innovation—marked by criticism and demanded by avant-garde institutions as a means of self-authentication—causes artists associated with realism as a movement to be subjected to what the Spanish scholar Pedro A. Cruz Sánchez has termed the “code of silence.” This implies the absence of critical engagement with creators who employ concrete representation and traditional supports—such as painting on canvas or sculpture in stone or bronze—and the obligatory disqualification of the genre for its perceived distance from prevailing mainstream trends.
As absurd as it may seem, today the eternal diatribe persists between the permanence of the aesthetic object and the need to dispense with it as a symbol of contemporaneity. It is an endless game of disqualification and hierarchization. On the one hand, we hierarchize only that which conforms to current conceptual and semiotic canons—work that surprises, shocks, unsettles, and overwhelms. Art must distance itself from what we might call “artistic tradition,” incurring in the unexpected through technique, philosophy, or representation. Paradoxically, when artistic freedom leads an artist to employ traditional formulas, disqualification immediately ensues.
The values of contemporary painting that apply to Zesatti’s work are the very ones that, according to prevailing fashions, disqualify it: large formats, overflowing composition, gigantism of the subject (whether coconut, banana, or mangrove fragment), and—as noted earlier—the author’s concern with multiple dimensions, from plastic representation and facture to the existential sense of the viewing subject and the fragile permanence of nature itself. This leads us to consider that analytical criteria are not the same when, from the outset, a work does not obviously fulfill what is expected of it.
It is advisable to acknowledge that there is currently a discrediting of figuration as an aesthetic alternative. Nevertheless, we are witnessing its vertiginous return in the hands of the most recent generation, among whom we find Víctor Rodríguez and Marco Arce, to cite only two prominent cases.
It should be clarified that, unlike Armando Zesatti, these young artists have been academically trained and have actively participated in competitions that have distinguished and projected them within national and international exhibition circuits. This observation is not trivial: Zesatti, as a self-taught artist, has nonetheless successfully entered the professional world through other means. Even so, without academic training, the resources he employs are similar to those of his contemporaries. Photography, for example, serves as a vehicle for registering immediacy and discovering compositions that might otherwise go unnoticed. Large scale—less of the support than of the compositional elements—appears, in Zesatti’s case, to derive from the urban language of billboards that bombard us everywhere with consumerist information, a paradox since the images reproduced on his canvases come from antithetical natural environments far removed from the metropolis and capture a veiled ecological concern.
Although Zesatti’s painting points toward a strict register of nature, the subjects of his works assume a peculiar iconic sense, as they become direct representations of the collective unconscious. At first glance, all elements are precise and identifiable, yet in pursuit of greater effectiveness he introduces alterations that limit—and perhaps even contradict—the sense of reality.
Indeed, it may be asserted that Zesatti’s realism is Platonic realism, wherein the reproduced image is directed more toward the idea we hold of it than toward the model itself; they are mirrors of our own ideas. In Landscape with Poppies, strict verism disappears when we demand from the eye a deeper observation that dissects color, brushstroke, and form, revealing the artificiality of the effect and the artist’s irony. Our dreamed reality is just that—a dream materialized in carefully constructed fields of color, in skillfully planned contrasts that form an ocular trap, meticulously elaborated to satisfy the gaze. The pursuit of effect subverts naturalistic affiliation by making artificiality its origin.
Armando Zesatti stands at a point where evaluative criteria tend to place him on one side of the thin line dividing the memorable from the inconsequential. We find necessary—and possible—a critical decision that presents his visual proposal as a conscious act of revelation and denunciation of the fragility of our environment and the consequences of the violent depredation in which we all participate. It reveals that the generalized concern for nature is more a tourist fantasy, a romantic illusion, than a genuine effort to preserve an already threatened ecological balance. It is a state of illusion and appearances.
By assuming a position, human beings may seriously defend their environment; by clarifying his position, the artist may consolidate a solid future development. He possesses the elements and the quality. It is merely a question of definitions.