6
THE LONELINESS OF THE ETERNAL
The mountain is silence; Obregón’s landscapes
are silence. One feels the volcano by listening
to it, by allowing oneself to be possessed by its
loneliness. Mountains are there to be observed
in meditation, in the peacefulness of something
that awes us with the power of its quietude. Wise
men, saints and painters go to the mountain. You
paint as you meditate, in silence. The landscape
artist is a solitary being that is accompanied by
something one cannot grasp with sight. Upon
contemplating Obregón’s volcanic heights, their
millenary forms, their geological quirks, the
colors he carefully chooses to avoid faithfulness
or realism, always in search of verisimilitude,
one comes to understand that he was together
with that summit for days on end; that they
were listening to each other, watching each
other, respectively understanding what they
are, sharing the realm of nature. In learning who
we are, landscapes give us a lesson in humility.
What is more humbling than contemplating the
shape and height of
Iztaccíhuatl
? Recreating it
is paying tribute to its presence, millions of years
removed. We’ll never know what the mountain
watches, but we see what Obregón paints, we
follow his careful strokes, full of wisdom, as they
reinvent snow, soil and rocks. We follow him
up the slopes in search of those details that
make each mountain and volcano unique and
unrepeatable. There is no continuity, no family
relation; each peak is different and is possessed
by a different spirit. For how long has Obregón
been living in the instability of the abyss in order
to grasp the landscape, trying to communicate
with the mountain? His entire painting life, and
more –it doesn’t matter how long. The mountain
is patient and is waiting for him. Painting is
not a manual exercise; it is an intellectual and
emotional work, a life-changing decision. There
are a lesson and a metaphor pertaining to the
landscape painter and to art itself. Art is lived
like climbing a mountain whose summit we can
never glimpse, like a never-ending mission. You
go up, not knowing where you’ll be arriving to,
but you just can’t give up and stay by the road.
Art goes on even if life ends.
ESSENTIALLY MONOCHROMIC
Landscapes arememory, nostalgia, the realmof the
imaginary. You covet the landscape; wars wave
been waged for the possession of land; mountain
ranges are natural boundaries. Describing a
landscape is exercising the imagination and
is a form of seduction. To promise a mythical
place, an inhabitable legend where we can die,
is a dream, an unreachable ideal. Obregón’s
landscapes –drawn with charcoal, black strokes
on a white background– perfectly evoke an ideal
spot.
La Barranca de Alcalícan
is a large format,
monochromic piece describing a place that
becomes an abstraction because it is devoid
of color. Such abstraction makes it impossible,
therefore fantastic. It becomes a work of pure
invention. Obregón’s drawing is obsessive and
synthetic. It describes snow, the shape of the
slopes and a shadow that covers the enormous
land, originated by movement and by time, as we
see it flowing through light. Drawing is one of the
most austere forms of creation. You only need
