ART/ARCHITECTURE: UP AND COMING — Roberto Cortazar; A Portraitist of Consciousness

Edward M. Gomez

“MEXICO CITY— The view from the high-rise building in which the painter Roberto Cortazar lives and works, in an outlying district of Mexico City, offers a reminder that the sprawling metropolis below can resemble a huge, restless organism in constant motion. Sometimes Mr. Cortazar regards this city, where he was born 37 years ago, as ”a kind of body,” he said. The human body itself is a form, he added, ”and like any form in the universe, from a cell to a planet, it’s also extremely complex.”

Mr. Cortazar’s preoccupation with the human figure and his meticulous rendering of it helped draw attention to his work soon after he graduated from the National School of the Arts here in 1983. For his drawings, he won a prize that year named after the important Mexican modern artist Jose Luis Cuevas. Mr. Cortazar then developed a painting style that blended images of male and female nudes, emotionally ambiguous in pose and expression, with passages of watery abstraction.”

Edward M. Gomez, Roberto Cortazar; A Portraitist of Consciousness, article, The New York Times, 1999

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