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Lot Essay
There was Chac Mool, erect, smiling, ocher, with his belly of flesh. He paralyzed me with his two tiny, squinting eyes that were so close to his triangular nose. Biting his upper lip, his bottom teeth were immobile; only the brilliance of the unusually large, square helmet on his head, indicated life. Chac Mool advanced towards the bed; then it began to rain.
--Carlos Fuentes, Chac Mool
In 1954, painter Ricardo Martínez drew a vignette to illustrate the cover of Los días enmascarados, a collection of short stories by the celebrated novelist Carlos Fuentes, his first book from which the above epigram is taken (author’s translation, Mexico, 1966, p. 24). For the book’s cover, Martínez created a simple line drawing of the reclining pre-Columbian statuary known as the “Chac Mool” upon which casually lay a man in a business suit and hat, to highlight Fuentes’ frightening tale of a sculpture by the same name, who comes to life as the embodiment of the powerful god Tlaloc and consumes that of his new owner. Fuentes’ Chac Mool figure must have gotten under Martínez’ skin, for the recumbent body, at once of flesh and stone, became a repeated form that the painter explored on canvas. “It was the translation of three-dimensional form, of mythic proportions, into two dimensions that became painter Ricardo Martínez’s life-long pursuit” I concluded in the catalogue note at the time the artist’s painting El Gusto (Taste) [1956] was auctioned through Christie’s Latin American Art Sale Catalogue in 2019. From the late-1950s when he initiated what would become his signature style, of which Figura yacente is highly representative, up until his death in 2009, Martínez meditated on the contours of the naked human figure and how its ample mass—weighty, corpulent, monumental, and supported by the earth upon which it rests—might defy gravity and emerge from the frame which contains it.
Martínez nourished his drawing and painting practice with the study and acquisition of more than 300 pre-Columbian objects during his lifetime, favoring the Olmec as documented in the 2019 film produced by the Fundación Ricardo Martínez de Hoyos and Canal 22. And perhaps truly taking to heart the warning in Fuentes’ story about the dangers of removing a cultural and religious object from its original home, no Chac Mool was present among them. At least sixty of these recumbent three-dimensional figures have been found throughout Mexico (but none among the ancient Olmec) and as far South as Costa Rica and El Salvador since the explorer Augustus Le Plongeon first unearthed such a figure at Chichén Itzá in 1875 and called it “Chac Mool,” meaning “red or great jaguar paw” in Yucatec Maya as Mary Ann Miller has outlined in her scholarship on the subject. These monoliths dating from the post-Classic era, 900 to 1520 A.D., predominantly male, are horizontal figures carved from a single piece of stone, lying on their backs, torso and knees lifted pointing skyward, elbows at sides with hands placed at a vessel or disk resting on their belly, head turned at a ninety-degree angle. As with Figura yacente, two of the known sculptures to date tilt their knees forward. These are Maya from the Yucatán, one held in the Museo Regional de Antropología in Mérida, and the other in Dzibilchaltún. The latter is nicknamed “Chac Moola” for her languid repose, which is echoed in Figura yacente’s voluptuous sensuality. At the same time, the tense pose of Martínez’ figure subtly celebrates male virility.
In addition to a potential for danger and regenerative power, with Figura yacente Martínez also evokes heat, fire, and the notion of sacrifice in the crimson hues which envelope, and even forge his reclining figure. Scholars have varyingly thought Chac Mool to be a messenger between human and gods, or the god of wine Tezcatzoncatl, the Toltec god of fire, Xiuhtecuhtli, the rain god Tlaloc, or captives or fallen warriors as scholars Jesús Sánchez and Enrique Juan Palacios have proposed. Those Chac Mools produced by Tarascan, Toltec, Toltec-Maya and Aztec would have served a religious or ceremonial purpose, the vessels at their bellies considered a place where offerings could be made to the gods, such as copal incense, pulque, butterflies, or human hearts. As the Argentine art critic Marta Traba summarized on the occasion of the artist’s 1967 solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, Martínez “Comes from the past, from the pure and crystalized expression of Pre-Columbian beauty and, like an immense and quiet wave, engulfs all occurrence” (in Pintura de Ricardo Martínez, Mexico City, exh. cat., 1969, n.p.). Similarly, art historian Teresa del Conde writing for the exhibition catalogue Pintura mexicana 1950-1980 in 1990 stated that Martínez paintings “unfailingly represent a figure with sculptural overtones that is almost always the same: the ancestor” (p. 33).
Committed to his personal style of figurative abstraction grounded in pre-Columbian sculptural form, Martínez stayed the course even during the long decade of the 1970s where Mexican artists joined Los grupos collectives taking their art into the streets, and young painters under the rubric of neomexicanidad (Neo-Mexicanism) generated a renewed figuration of social critique as they reconsidered official versions of mexicanidad (Mexican identity). Over his long career, Martínez’s style shifted from his earliest production, which was aligned with the post-Revolutionary Contracorriente (Counter-Current), to arriving at his mature style mid-century with the Ruptura (“Break” with the Mexican School). Martínez’ trajectory in painting was similar to his colleague Juan Soriano’s (1920-2006), in that they both transitioned from focusing on the regional, intimate, and every day, informed by European vanguard movements of Surrealism and Italian Metaphysical painting, to exploring figurative and geometric abstraction within a universal language. Painted in 1979, when Martínez was 71 years of age, Figura yacente is a testament to that unwavering purpose and singular pursuit that Traba and Del Conde pointed to.
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio
--Carlos Fuentes, Chac Mool
In 1954, painter Ricardo Martínez drew a vignette to illustrate the cover of Los días enmascarados, a collection of short stories by the celebrated novelist Carlos Fuentes, his first book from which the above epigram is taken (author’s translation, Mexico, 1966, p. 24). For the book’s cover, Martínez created a simple line drawing of the reclining pre-Columbian statuary known as the “Chac Mool” upon which casually lay a man in a business suit and hat, to highlight Fuentes’ frightening tale of a sculpture by the same name, who comes to life as the embodiment of the powerful god Tlaloc and consumes that of his new owner. Fuentes’ Chac Mool figure must have gotten under Martínez’ skin, for the recumbent body, at once of flesh and stone, became a repeated form that the painter explored on canvas. “It was the translation of three-dimensional form, of mythic proportions, into two dimensions that became painter Ricardo Martínez’s life-long pursuit” I concluded in the catalogue note at the time the artist’s painting El Gusto (Taste) [1956] was auctioned through Christie’s Latin American Art Sale Catalogue in 2019. From the late-1950s when he initiated what would become his signature style, of which Figura yacente is highly representative, up until his death in 2009, Martínez meditated on the contours of the naked human figure and how its ample mass—weighty, corpulent, monumental, and supported by the earth upon which it rests—might defy gravity and emerge from the frame which contains it.
Martínez nourished his drawing and painting practice with the study and acquisition of more than 300 pre-Columbian objects during his lifetime, favoring the Olmec as documented in the 2019 film produced by the Fundación Ricardo Martínez de Hoyos and Canal 22. And perhaps truly taking to heart the warning in Fuentes’ story about the dangers of removing a cultural and religious object from its original home, no Chac Mool was present among them. At least sixty of these recumbent three-dimensional figures have been found throughout Mexico (but none among the ancient Olmec) and as far South as Costa Rica and El Salvador since the explorer Augustus Le Plongeon first unearthed such a figure at Chichén Itzá in 1875 and called it “Chac Mool,” meaning “red or great jaguar paw” in Yucatec Maya as Mary Ann Miller has outlined in her scholarship on the subject. These monoliths dating from the post-Classic era, 900 to 1520 A.D., predominantly male, are horizontal figures carved from a single piece of stone, lying on their backs, torso and knees lifted pointing skyward, elbows at sides with hands placed at a vessel or disk resting on their belly, head turned at a ninety-degree angle. As with Figura yacente, two of the known sculptures to date tilt their knees forward. These are Maya from the Yucatán, one held in the Museo Regional de Antropología in Mérida, and the other in Dzibilchaltún. The latter is nicknamed “Chac Moola” for her languid repose, which is echoed in Figura yacente’s voluptuous sensuality. At the same time, the tense pose of Martínez’ figure subtly celebrates male virility.
In addition to a potential for danger and regenerative power, with Figura yacente Martínez also evokes heat, fire, and the notion of sacrifice in the crimson hues which envelope, and even forge his reclining figure. Scholars have varyingly thought Chac Mool to be a messenger between human and gods, or the god of wine Tezcatzoncatl, the Toltec god of fire, Xiuhtecuhtli, the rain god Tlaloc, or captives or fallen warriors as scholars Jesús Sánchez and Enrique Juan Palacios have proposed. Those Chac Mools produced by Tarascan, Toltec, Toltec-Maya and Aztec would have served a religious or ceremonial purpose, the vessels at their bellies considered a place where offerings could be made to the gods, such as copal incense, pulque, butterflies, or human hearts. As the Argentine art critic Marta Traba summarized on the occasion of the artist’s 1967 solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, Martínez “Comes from the past, from the pure and crystalized expression of Pre-Columbian beauty and, like an immense and quiet wave, engulfs all occurrence” (in Pintura de Ricardo Martínez, Mexico City, exh. cat., 1969, n.p.). Similarly, art historian Teresa del Conde writing for the exhibition catalogue Pintura mexicana 1950-1980 in 1990 stated that Martínez paintings “unfailingly represent a figure with sculptural overtones that is almost always the same: the ancestor” (p. 33).
Committed to his personal style of figurative abstraction grounded in pre-Columbian sculptural form, Martínez stayed the course even during the long decade of the 1970s where Mexican artists joined Los grupos collectives taking their art into the streets, and young painters under the rubric of neomexicanidad (Neo-Mexicanism) generated a renewed figuration of social critique as they reconsidered official versions of mexicanidad (Mexican identity). Over his long career, Martínez’s style shifted from his earliest production, which was aligned with the post-Revolutionary Contracorriente (Counter-Current), to arriving at his mature style mid-century with the Ruptura (“Break” with the Mexican School). Martínez’ trajectory in painting was similar to his colleague Juan Soriano’s (1920-2006), in that they both transitioned from focusing on the regional, intimate, and every day, informed by European vanguard movements of Surrealism and Italian Metaphysical painting, to exploring figurative and geometric abstraction within a universal language. Painted in 1979, when Martínez was 71 years of age, Figura yacente is a testament to that unwavering purpose and singular pursuit that Traba and Del Conde pointed to.
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio