Luz M. Sepúlveda

The language used by contemporary artists is fairly homogeneous despite its apparent plurality. Forms and techniques are the same as those found anywhere in the world, and the signs employed are universal. Hybrid practices function both in our country and in virtually any other. Just as at the beginning of the twentieth century a “Mexicanized” art was created, now, in the closing years of the first decade of the twenty-first century, artistic practice operates from a foreignizing perspective, even though various easily identifiable motifs rooted in the Mexican pictorial tradition continue to prevail. Current models serve as guidelines for ways of thinking and acting within specific times and spaces, although in Mexico diverse elements of identity are still considered. For example, self-parody or a sense of humor that is often dark, political satire, self-pity, portraits of figures that make up the artist’s immediate environment, disparate landscapes, and, in short, these motifs among many others, are addressed by contemporary artists and treated in their paintings from formal, thematic, or technical perspectives that are absolutely free and therefore plural in form, even if analogous in discourse.

Despite this apparent paradise of creative freedom—much like in advertising or in almost any other corner of marketing—contemporary art offers objects that seduce the viewer. The paintings of this generation present themselves as objects of desire that dazzle us with a brilliance perceived both physically and metaphorically. They share a common denominator: their function is to enchant the public, to appear as objects that seduce us by being essentially superfluous. Nevertheless, despite the general atmosphere of frivolity, several works provoke, if not outright questioning, at least a slight reflection on the course of contemporary visual art production in Mexico.

The variety of pictorial discourses present today lies in a heterogeneity of expressions in which languages so different from one another coexist that they may appear paradoxical. There is no limitation to which the artist must restrict himself, and he enjoys full freedom to channel his production. Some examples of contemporary painting refer to a decorative art with ornamental elements, as in the case of Miguel Ángel Cordera, who employs sinuous lines, organic forms, and spaces densely populated with colors and abstract figures across the canvas. The representation of landscape—at a time when an image of this kind might seem obsolete and instead is posited as reactionary—is re-created by Armando Zesatti and Vanessa García in different ways: the former opts for the expression of a superhuman nature, while the latter turns her gaze toward maritime landscapes, particularly ports with warehouses, docks, containers, cranes, and vessels that assert themselves in the foreground, while fragments of an industrialized zone emerge in the background.