All posts tagged: Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington Museum / Centro De Las Artes San Luis Potosi / Diary # 6

Leonora Carrington Museum / Centro De Las Artes San Luis Potosi / Diary # 6

Was Leonora Carrington revealing to us a world of creatures that once existed in our world which we evolved from, or was she following the natural indicators that she sensed to predict the world and people that we would eventually become?

Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

These man/animal hybrids have been adapted into pop culture via science fiction and even by politicians and scientists. Today we have cameras that read faces and individual physical gaits, drones the size of insects, robots that carry bombs into homes like long-legged spiders tottering over all terrains, and the ability to change the weather.

Prehistoric world descriptions suggest the existence of dinosaur-sized monsters that could fly and mythic, even Biblical writings conjure images of heads covered with snakes, people turning to pillars of salt, men parting seas, walking on water, etc.

Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

I don’t know if I’m inventing the world I paint,” said the Mexican surrealist Leanora Carrington, “I think rather it is that world that I invent myself.”

Was she being a coy artist, or was she empowering each of us with the ability to bend the arc of time, to alter the future with our imaginations?

Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

A recent visit to the Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi in Mexico gave us the opportunity to see a collection of her astounding otherworldly sculptures and drawings and to appreciate her mind’s suggestions in a fully dimensional way.

“Art is a magic that makes the hours fade and even the days dissolve in seconds,” she said.

The 1940s in Mexico sprouted surrealism in art and literature that met, rivaled, and sometimes superseded the movements of Dali, Breton, and Ernst. The British-born Carrington was a surrealist painter and novelist, living most of her adult life in Mexico City, a five-hour drive south of here. Considered one of the last surviving participants of the surrealist movement of the 1930s, this country hosted a legion of artists embracing the surrealism and spreading the magic realism equally through literature and painting with names like the poet Octavio Paz, painters Alfonso Michel, Carlos Orozco Romero, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, sculptor Luis Ortiz Monasterio, illustrator Roberto Montenegro, David Alfaro Siqueiros…

Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Industrial, post-industrial, and mechanized worlds were de-humanizing humans, pushing children into factories, de-naturing the natural world, compressing minds into chattel, steering humans into ovens, and giving them wings to fly high above the Earth – offering a continuous economic boom, followed by a bust, followed by a boom. Nothing has made much sense since then.

So it was little surprise to see the families at this exhibition in a former prison, the teens posing for selfies with figures that have animal heads, webbed appendages. Carrington’s references to sorcery, metamorphosis, alchemy, the occult and Celtic mythology blend magically into this country’s fixations- a native people’s psyche destroyed by the European invader, and Catholic church’s full-sized portrayals of the tortured, bloody body of Christ displayed in town after town – sometimes alongside the mystical hallowed figures that are so frightening as to evoke supervillans, or Phil Collins.

There is a strange logic to all of Carrington’s creatures – today grown adults wear similar costumes to conventions, and young men bomb villages in the Middle-East while sitting in a basement thousands of miles away. Are these wild frightful creatures what we were, what we are, or what we will become? Carrington is merely helping you imagine.

Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Leonora Carrington Museum. Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosi. San Luis Potosi, Mexico. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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Mexico City : A New Surrealist Face for Street Art

Comic, surrealist, role-playing psychological explorations, with a tip of the hat to Breton, Carrington, and Lucha Libre, among others.

Pixel Pancho (photo © XAM)

Mexico City culture can be as varied and diverse as it is homogeneous, with a respect for tradition and, when it comes to artistic expression, a catalyst for exploration. André Breton is reported to have described Mexico as “the most surrealist country in the world,” where painters like Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo unhinged their imaginations from the limitations of the material world. As these new images on the streets of Mexico City taken by Brooklyn architectural street artist XAM show, the love for a psychic automatism continues into the public sphere.

Of course the Mexicans are not strangers to art on the streets; “great Latin American muralists” is a phrase almost synonymous with Mexico and names like Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros coming to mind. Political advocacy and populist criticism of social policy on the walls here is similarly a tradition respected by the culture. Now a century after the revolution and birth of the modern Mexico, the experience of Los Capitalinos, as the residents of Mexico City are called, is affected daily by surrealism, pop culture and global capitalism swimming alongside folk and historical symbology, and a bit of anarchy. It’s all part of one fabric, a rich and varied textile that we export to you here.

Ben Eine (photo © XAM)

Says XAM of his experience, “Barcelona, NYC, Amsterdam, and Paris are all similar in a way when it comes to street art – you can walk around and come across work on the streets fairly easily, but traversing the barrios of Mexico city is much different. I guess in some way you can compare it to San Francisco, Chicago or Los Angeles – there is quality work to be found. The city differs from all mentioned in that it appears to be young when it comes to street art by having a small group of participants.”

“I was hosted by both MUMUTT Arte and Museo del Juguete Antiguo Mexico, who are both responsible for providing concrete canvases in Mexico City for artist such as ROA, M-City, Pixel Pancho, and fresh stuff from the locals like Saner, Sego and the MOZ crew. Mexico City DF has the most museums in the world and MUMUTT and Museo del Juguete are largely responsible for adding street art to the vast archive of amazing work. They escorted me around to locations they provided for the above artists – It is evident that everyone brought their A-game. The weathered concrete walls made wonderful surfaces for imagery such as Dronz & Koko’s character, offering hallucinatory candy at the toy museum to Ben Eine’s work that speaks about class issues on a worksite for a future mall.”

Ben Eine (photo © XAM)

Pixel Pancho (photo © XAM)

Pixel Pancho (photo © XAM)

Liqen (photo © XAM)

Jaz (photo © XAM)

Saner (photo © XAM)

Saner (photo © XAM)

Saner in collaboration with Bastardilla (photo © XAM)

Samurai . Ceci (photo © XAM)

Roman (photo © XAM)

Roman . Acute (photo © XAM)

ROA (photo © XAM)

Meah (photo © XAM)

Broken Crow (photo © XAM)

MCity (photo © XAM)

MCity (photo © XAM)

Moz Crew (photo © XAM)

Moz Crew (photo © XAM)

Moz Crew (photo © XAM)

Kokor . Dronz (photo © XAM)

Bimek . Done (photo © XAM)

Bue (photo © XAM)

Ever (photo © XAM)

SBTG. The artist worked on this piece on commission to promote an event sponsored by a shoe company. We like the placement. (photo © XAM)

Click on the links below to read our previous stories of MAMUTT Arte and MUJAM and to learn more about their work in Mexico City:

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/2011/09/20/m-city-in-m-city-polish-stencillist-in-mexico/

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/2011/05/07/video-premiere-broken-crow-in-mexico/

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/2011/03/04/broken-crow-a-mexican-travelog/

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/2011/03/09/broken-crow-a-mexican-travelog-part-ii/

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/2011/02/05/roas-magic-naturalism-street-arts-wild-kingdom-in-mexico/

 

 

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Raarrrrhhrhrhhrrr! Veng Chomps Through Another Giant Wall (Bushwick)

Street Artist and burly bear Veng came out of hibernation this spring with a roaring hunger for walls and so far he’s foraged plenty of them in BKLN. From the breezy shores of La Isla Conejo to the rusty thickets of Bushwick, the borough of Brooklyn has a few hundred feet more of aerosol paint since this guy poked his head out of the cave during the thaw.

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Just this week we found him placidly smacking his choppers and savoring the last taste of lunch while sitting on a sidewalk and surveying the sweeping Veng Vista across the street; almost one entire block length wall that he’s completing this weekend for the big Bushwick Open Studios 2011.

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Now in it’s 5th year and produced by the volunteer army Arts in Bushwick, the studios and streets are fair game for visitors and artists of all stripes and abilities. Each year it is entertaining and educational to witness who’s moved on, who’s still hanging on, and who’s just arrived to claim credit for it all. Veng is one of the hangers-on; in fact one of the starter-uppers when it comes to Street Art here.

As we reported yesterday, Factory Fresh Gallery has two entries in this year’s festival, a veritable double bill of Indoor and Outdoor. Inside the gallery is “Surrealism,” perhaps in honor of the British-born Mexican Surrealist Master Leonora Carrington who passed away May 25th or perhaps to acknowledge Surrealism’s many currents running through pop culture and street culture today.

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The Outside portion showcases the “Bushwick Art Park”, FF’s entry to the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas, which proposes to build an art park on this very block of Vandevoort Place where Veng is painting. No stranger to surrealism himself, Veng often depicts his characters in other-worldly portraits with birds as hats and hats as boats and intricately detailed scenes nested within scenes.

These process shots from Thursday show him trampling along on the immense wall and by Friday he told us he’d be done. You’ll need to check this one yourself to verify. While bears can move fast sometimes, they also tend to favor long naps.

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo). Brick walls make Veng very happy as he loves this pattern and the demarcation of the bricks makes his job a lot easier.  He was beaming with joy.

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Ah Summer: At the base of Veng’s ladder this dandelion stood sunny and willful amidst the aerosol fumes and drips and the trash (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Veng (photo © Jaime Rojo)

To learn more about Factory Fresh “Surrealism” Show click below:

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/?p=21418

To learn more about “Bushwick Art Park” click below:

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/?p=21422

For a complete and detailed listing of all the events taking place at BOS2011 click below:

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/?p=21389

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