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LANDSCAPES,THE REVENGE OF PERMANENCE
By Avelina Lésper
Landscapes are the children of time. Earth is
more than three billion years old. Each mountain,
each geological feature, the atmosphere that
hovers above us, seemingly infinite, exist before
we became aware of their existence, before
we gathered knowledge about the world that
surrounds us. We have a philosophical and
poetical relationship with the territory we inhabit.
The landscape, that huge extension that we
contemplate, holds us, gives us a place and forces
us to bemeasured against its immensity. It is almost
reckless to pause and think that our existence can
be determined by landscapes, those expanses we
inhabit and handle and limit us. The landscape’s
borders are our own borders. Jorge Obregón
has decided to devote his talents to landscape
painting. It is an existential decision. Painting
landscapes implies an intimate relationship with
the place and a habit of observation that compels
one to stay and linger while the landscape
changes, moves on, evolves. The painter is there,
still, patient, and clouds roll above his head, light
turns into darkness, nature follows its course.
WISE MOUNTAINS
Obregón faces our ephemeral human condition
and our thirst for knowing things that we
cannot even imagine. He paints mountains and
volcanoes and challenges our limited powers of
sight with the eternity of those presences that
rise up abruptly and break the plateau’s surface.
The mountain knows everything we ignore. In
part, the landscape painter wants to make the
pilgrimage to the summit searching for wisdom
and trying to understand the language spoken
by the spirits that inhabit it. In the painting,
Chicnautécatl, Nevado deToluca
, the volcano’s
crater appears, showing the lagoons of the
Sun and the Moon. The atmosphere is blue
and pours out over the summits, on the broken
margins of the crater, shinning between the sky
and the lagoons. In the foreground we see a rock
formation, but Obregón’s sight lies elsewhere
and takes us to the volcano’s snowy summits. He
allows himself to be seduced by the enigmatic
shapes those boulders take. He betrays his taste
for dimension, for the inner life that each volcano
carries within itself and for the unpredictable and
violent mood of their awakenings. The terrain’s
folds and scars, the peace of solitude, the vertigo
of heights and the climate are present in every
detail. Bringing a mountain into a canvas is an
almost scientific exercise in scale recreating that
dramatically describes the colossal formation
and the smallness of men, even without having
a person within the composition. Seeing a
mountain painted by Obregón makes us climb
up its slopes, invites us to inhabit it and to think
about it as an eternal being that is waiting for us
and wants to tell us something.
