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Lot Essay
“Toledo paints as a man who lives in harmony with nature,” the poet Luis Cardoza y Aragón, a longtime friend, once reflected. “In whose eyes the memory of time immemorial burns and continuously renews itself” (quoted in E. Billeter, “In the Cosmos of the Animals—The Adventure of the Fantasy,” in Zoología Fantástica, Mexico City, Prisma Editorial, 2003, p. 27). The beginnings of Toledo’s animistic worldview date to his adolescent years, redolent with memories of roaming the land and encounters with the storied creatures—monkeys and crabs, grasshoppers and crocodiles—held sacred within Oaxacan lore. Toledo studied lithography at the Taller Libre de Grabado in Mexico City in the late 1950s before moving in 1960 to Paris, where he met Octavio Paz and Rufino Tamayo; he returned to Juchitán, his birthplace, in 1965. Associated with the postwar Ruptura generation, which broke with the political mission of Mexican muralism in favor of experimental and sometimes abstract expressionism, his work is contemporary with such artists as Pedro Coronel, Alberto Gironella, and Rodolfo Nieto. Like Tamayo and Rodolfo Morales deeply invested in the cultural patrimony of the Isthmus and Pacific coast, Toledo based himself in Oaxaca, his work and identity richly imbricated within the region’s historical landscape and ecology. Fondly known as El Maestro, he lent sizable support to local institutions, notably the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, as well as to libraries and the cultural and environmental conservancy Pro-OAX.
Toledo drew amply from ancient American mythology and its fantastic zoology, populating his images with sagacious and otherworldly anthropomorphic beings. “The pre-Hispanic world has been a source of inspiration,” he explained. “There are certain solutions that are decorative that come from pre-Hispanic art and at the same time there is much primitive art that is refined or simple but also very modern. It also comes from what I read—many fables from the Americas and other parts of the world” (quoted in G. Mead Moore, “Francisco Toledo,” Bomb 70, 2000, p. 115). His paintings celebrate the syncretic spirituality of the indigenous world, depicting extraordinary creatures in myriad states of metamorphosis and in intimate rituals of creation and consummation. Animals were privileged and miraculous beings in Zapotec legend, the “connecting link between nature and society, mediators between man and the sacred energies of the natural ambience,” art historian Erika Billeter has noted. “Animals were the real character of the myth, the sublimation of a whole cosmic imagination” (quoted in “In the Cosmos of the Animals,” p. 25). Toledo’s work swarms with the fauna of the natural and phantasmagorical worlds. His animals inhabit a charmed reality and they became, over the course of his career, an extended metaphor for the supernatural mysteries of the world.
“Toledo’s work is painting transformed into a body,” pronounced the poet Verónica Volkow. “Surfaces become tissue, the swelling of volumes are almost pregnant, the objects suddenly are reproduced endlessly. There is a materiality that acquires the expressive definiteness, the strength, and the surprising versatility of the body.” The space of the painting “suddenly becomes also a labyrinth or an intestine, a mouth or a uterus,” Volkow continued. “Space envelops us, caresses, devours, threatens, seduces, guides us and is always alive, injected with the body’s sap" (quoted in “In the Beginning, the World Became Body,” in Francisco Toledo, México City, 2002, p.40, 42-3). Peculiarly suspended in the present work, Toledo’s enchanted cow faces the viewer, its mien placid and gentle, as its body glides diagonally downward, defying gravity as it hovers in a strangely somatic, labyrinthine space. A palimpsest of vestigial lines and patterns, their spiral arrangements reminiscent of both the cosmos and the whorls of a fingerprint, the picture surface commingles celestial and earthly bodies, their forms percolating through allusive deposits of sand and rich, red and brown ocher pigments. The eponymous cow materializes out of this cosmic flux, its presence at once animating and primal, an abiding connection to a collective and prehistoric past. Inflected with lambent grains of sand, the mineral substrate of the natural world, and inlaid with esoteric linear designs, Toledo’s floating bovine body connotes the reciprocity of figure and ground, past and present, heavens and earth. As a visual abstraction of natural history, the painting embodies the sacred oneness of Toledo’s universe, a world given imaginative dimension by the Borgesian labyrinth and its classic themes of infinite regression, circular time, and universal mythology.
The erudite and metaliterary writings of Jorge Luis Borges long served as a touchstone for Toledo, who illustrated his marvelous Manual de zoología fantástica (1957) in the 1980s and founded a library for the blind, in Oaxaca, in his name. Borges’s writings abound with references to labyrinths, often taking their spiraling, recursive form. His short story, “The House of Asterion” (1947), returns to the archetypal labyrinth of ancient Greece and its monstrous inhabitant, the Minotaur—part man and part bull—from whose perspective a revisionist, postmodern tale of redemption is told. “I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars,” reflects the narrator of “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), a story-within-a-story in which text, labyrinth, and universe become one. “I felt that the world was a labyrinth, from which it was impossible to flee” (quoted in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, New York, New Directions, 1964, p. 23, 85). Vaca en un laberinto pays splendid homage to this Borgesian, labyrinthine metareality: Toledo’s cow happily stands in for the beleaguered Minotaur, casting adrift in a ruddy, sand-specked labyrinth of its own, a metaphor for the natural world, the mystery of creation and, possibly, the quest to find the center of the artist’s own true self. “Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people,” Borges wrote in the epilogue to Dreamtigers. “Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face" (quoted in Dreamtigers, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1964, p. 93).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Toledo drew amply from ancient American mythology and its fantastic zoology, populating his images with sagacious and otherworldly anthropomorphic beings. “The pre-Hispanic world has been a source of inspiration,” he explained. “There are certain solutions that are decorative that come from pre-Hispanic art and at the same time there is much primitive art that is refined or simple but also very modern. It also comes from what I read—many fables from the Americas and other parts of the world” (quoted in G. Mead Moore, “Francisco Toledo,” Bomb 70, 2000, p. 115). His paintings celebrate the syncretic spirituality of the indigenous world, depicting extraordinary creatures in myriad states of metamorphosis and in intimate rituals of creation and consummation. Animals were privileged and miraculous beings in Zapotec legend, the “connecting link between nature and society, mediators between man and the sacred energies of the natural ambience,” art historian Erika Billeter has noted. “Animals were the real character of the myth, the sublimation of a whole cosmic imagination” (quoted in “In the Cosmos of the Animals,” p. 25). Toledo’s work swarms with the fauna of the natural and phantasmagorical worlds. His animals inhabit a charmed reality and they became, over the course of his career, an extended metaphor for the supernatural mysteries of the world.
“Toledo’s work is painting transformed into a body,” pronounced the poet Verónica Volkow. “Surfaces become tissue, the swelling of volumes are almost pregnant, the objects suddenly are reproduced endlessly. There is a materiality that acquires the expressive definiteness, the strength, and the surprising versatility of the body.” The space of the painting “suddenly becomes also a labyrinth or an intestine, a mouth or a uterus,” Volkow continued. “Space envelops us, caresses, devours, threatens, seduces, guides us and is always alive, injected with the body’s sap" (quoted in “In the Beginning, the World Became Body,” in Francisco Toledo, México City, 2002, p.40, 42-3). Peculiarly suspended in the present work, Toledo’s enchanted cow faces the viewer, its mien placid and gentle, as its body glides diagonally downward, defying gravity as it hovers in a strangely somatic, labyrinthine space. A palimpsest of vestigial lines and patterns, their spiral arrangements reminiscent of both the cosmos and the whorls of a fingerprint, the picture surface commingles celestial and earthly bodies, their forms percolating through allusive deposits of sand and rich, red and brown ocher pigments. The eponymous cow materializes out of this cosmic flux, its presence at once animating and primal, an abiding connection to a collective and prehistoric past. Inflected with lambent grains of sand, the mineral substrate of the natural world, and inlaid with esoteric linear designs, Toledo’s floating bovine body connotes the reciprocity of figure and ground, past and present, heavens and earth. As a visual abstraction of natural history, the painting embodies the sacred oneness of Toledo’s universe, a world given imaginative dimension by the Borgesian labyrinth and its classic themes of infinite regression, circular time, and universal mythology.
The erudite and metaliterary writings of Jorge Luis Borges long served as a touchstone for Toledo, who illustrated his marvelous Manual de zoología fantástica (1957) in the 1980s and founded a library for the blind, in Oaxaca, in his name. Borges’s writings abound with references to labyrinths, often taking their spiraling, recursive form. His short story, “The House of Asterion” (1947), returns to the archetypal labyrinth of ancient Greece and its monstrous inhabitant, the Minotaur—part man and part bull—from whose perspective a revisionist, postmodern tale of redemption is told. “I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars,” reflects the narrator of “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), a story-within-a-story in which text, labyrinth, and universe become one. “I felt that the world was a labyrinth, from which it was impossible to flee” (quoted in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, New York, New Directions, 1964, p. 23, 85). Vaca en un laberinto pays splendid homage to this Borgesian, labyrinthine metareality: Toledo’s cow happily stands in for the beleaguered Minotaur, casting adrift in a ruddy, sand-specked labyrinth of its own, a metaphor for the natural world, the mystery of creation and, possibly, the quest to find the center of the artist’s own true self. “Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people,” Borges wrote in the epilogue to Dreamtigers. “Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face" (quoted in Dreamtigers, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1964, p. 93).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park