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paper and charcoal to invent, to recreate
something infinite, and to do it with such
truth that we don’t need color to understand
it and enjoy it. Obregón’s drawings are full
of pleasure. They invite us to stand before
them for a long time and to linger on his skill
and knowledge. His monochromic style gives
us a sculptured sense of the mountain. These
broken landscapes (that are, however, calm) are
immeasurable sculptures modeled by nature,
by a creative force infinitely stronger than
ours, human beings. By drawing and sculpting
them (his sculptures are tactile pieces bathed
in silver), the artist is compelled to think and
feel as nature does (
See pages 48 and 49
).
A shape is not faithfully reproduced if you
strive at copying a form. You have to reach
for the invisible that lives inside its materials,
lands, time, flowing water, snow and erosion.
You have to feel how it all happens, how the
wind’s drive stays on the rock, how the climate
and the unpredictable evolution leave a trace
and allow for an immense sculpture to exist
and define a man’s or a nation’s history.
A warrior defended a mountain for the sake of
his son. The battle claimed his life. In homage,
the son meditated during ten years in a cave
on themountain. He then carved it on his sword.
THE VULNERABLE LANDSCAPE
It is unsettling to see how we devour what
surrounds us. We don’t see it or understand
it, we don’t even love it, but we prey on it and
spoil it. In
Xico, el ombligo de la ciudad de
México
(oil on canvas), we see the volcano’s
crater surrounded by the corrosive city. We
watch from a privileged position that shows
the lake’s rim, the sky, depth divided in three
consecutive layers and a compositional
development that gives the painting a
vertiginous profundity. It is the triumph of
ensnaring perspective over the outlook
of the gods. Around the crater we see a gray
urban mass that eats up the volcano’s space,
that tramples all over its millenary right to
be there, that robs it of air, magnificence
and power. The compositional development
entails such a harmonic narrative of this
endless process of invasion that it becomes
a beautiful and tragic work, due in part to
the painting’s quality. Viewers become the
trapped volcano in a communicative exercise
of invaluable solidarity.
Xico
was here well
before us. The patch of land from which
it springs belongs to him. He is that crater
that cannot breath any longer. No one looks
at it and Obregón paints it so that we see it,
with all the knowledge of one who has been
here dozens of times, one who understands
what humans are doing to this volcano in the
name of progress.
Xico’s
silence is moving,
but is also a space of peace and depth over
the background noise that surrounds it, in
the disgraceful dilapidation we’re capable of.
Xico
would be a good example, if we could
get some of its power and strength.
