Untitled

“An obsession with finding a kind of philosopher’s stone of art is, it seems, what structures all of the varied and even contradictory work of Manuel Felguérez,” wrote the critic Jorge Alberto Manrique. “Always restless, always uncomfortable, always unsatisfied at heart, Felguérez has always formulated, in each work, the problem of painting, of its meaning, of its justification in every circumstance.” 1 These ontological questions preoccupied Felguérez across a long and distinguished career in which he probed the nature of abstraction, its geometries and its textures, across a range of traditional and experimental media. He trained in the workshop of the Cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine, in Paris, and returned to Mexico in 1956, teaching at the Escuela de Arte y Diseño of the Universidad Iberoamericana and later at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Felguérez emerged in the 1950s as a leader of the group of young artists that defined itself in opposition to the Mexican School and its long-dominant mode of muralism. In the age of La Ruptura, the term coined by the poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz to describe this generational shift, Felguérez and others rejected what had become an increasingly institutionalized nationalism in favor of greater aesthetic freedoms. These artists, among them José Luis Cuevas, Rafael Coronel, and Lilia Carrillo, pursued myriad directions within abstraction and figuration, engaging sources as disparate as pre-Hispanic cosmology, Old Master painting, and computer modeling. The recipient of an Honorable Mention at the XIII São Paulo Bienal (1975), he was awarded Mexico’s National Art Prize (1988) and designated Creator Emeritus (1993) by the Fonca National System of Art Creators.

“One of my essential aesthetic ideas is that art is creation, and so one shouldn’t repeat oneself,” Felguérez once explained. “My other concern…is that my work always be recognizable as being mine. I’m proud of not only constantly evolving, but evolving within certain limits.” After a short, but pioneering collaboration on computer drawings with the engineer Mayer Sasson at Harvard University in 1976, he “went back to turpentine,” as he put it. “I began working with a game of chance,” he continued, “I played intellectually with the idea of chaos and order. In place of the chaos created by the computer, I was trying to figure out how I could create chaos on a canvas. The easiest way to do it was to splatter the paint and let gravity decide the forms.” Felguérez evolved his technique over the years, incorporating the squirt gun, dripping paint from the can, and moving the canvas itself. “In the end,” he recently reflected of his career, “I’ve become an absolute classic because I’ve followed Leonardo da Vinci’s famous saying that art is mental, and I never lose sight of that.” 2

Intensely chromatic, Felguérez’s late canvases attest to his enduring faculties of invention within the medium of abstraction. A scaffolding of geometry gives structure to the present Untitled, reiterating the horizontality of the canvas through a repetition of rectangular forms. Yet its order is belied by irruptions of paint—alternately dripped and blotted, dense and layered—that materialize across the surface, creating a plastic chaos that Felguérez brilliantly commands. The incandescence of the golden yellow pigment, tempered by spatterings of black, evokes a cosmic feeling in Untitled, conveyed through a conjuring of color, movement, and line that calls up an infinite and multidimensional space. “We do not assimilate Felguérez’s propositions through our ears but rather through our eyes and touch: they are things that we can see and feel,” declared Octavio Paz. “But they are things endowed with mental properties brought to life not through a mechanism but through logic. Their multiple spaces speak to us: they unfold quietly before us and transform into a different space. Their metamorphosis reveals to us the rationality inherent in the forms. Spaces literally are made and constructed before our eyes with a logic that, deep down, is not different from the seed that becomes root, stem, flower, fruit. The logic of life.” 3

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park

1 Jorge Alberto Manrique (1974), in 12 Latin American Artists Today (Mexico City: Plural, 1975), 20.
2 Manuel Felguérez, in Pilar García, “The Drive to Create: A Conversation,” in Manuel Felguérez: Trayectorias (Mexico City: MUAC, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, 2019), 37, 53, 55.
3 Octavio Paz (1973), in Felguérez (Miami: Durban Segnini Gallery, 2016), 27.