Visión de México y sus Artistas – Paralelismos en la Plástica de los Siglos XIX y XXI

Lupina Lara Elizondo

This book is part of a series of publications with the intention of promoting Mexican Art. This edition explores the Parallels in the Visual Arts of the 19th and 21st Centuries, Lupina Lara Elizondo draws these parallels through analysing the practices of Mexican Artists. Roberto Cortázar‘s work is extensively discussed in reference to this cultural conversation:

“It is somewhat strange to find a young painter of the avant-garde who includes serious analysis and reflection in his artistic discourse, in addition to paintings enriched by extraordinary skill. The expressiveness of Cortázar’s work inspires meditation. Roberto, a good conceptualist, talks about painting in terms of language, and refers frequently to its content. He believes an artist should possess and enhance his culture constantly, that he should participate in the outside world to form his own view of reality, and that he should stay in constant contact with his circumstances and courses of reflection. In this manner, he will add to his own concepts, which in turn will influence his artistic language. The creative process of Cortázar’s work has been defined as sensitive painting inspired by the animus or soul. Cortázar works directly from models, and avoids losing in sketches the vitality derived from simultaneous observation and creation. He is thus able to grasp and transmit the model’s essence to the paper or canvas. But as Roberto comments, something of himself is also melded into the process: his point of view, his form of appreciation, his awareness, his sensitivity and his mastery.

Cortázar is rigorous with his drawing and composition. He dominates human anatomy to an extreme degree and can direct it to a maximum level of expression. His figures of men and women speak through their bodies: they can move with naturalness, adopt any pose and make manifest any emotion – the freedom resulting from extraordinary drawing. According to former academy requirements, a painter could not start to use oils until he has mastered drawing, anatomy and composition. In adherence with this line of thought, Cortázar demonstrated his greatest talents as a draftsman before taking up the brushes. Oil paints allowed a new range expression to appear in his painting, with the mutual demands of drawing, colour and composition.

[…]

In Roberto Cortázar’s recent work, the human figures unfold and transform – just the transformation that motivates the artist. Such a diversity of possibilities challenges his drawing and stimulates his brushes to produce a setting. For a virtuoso, ambitions are simply possibilities waiting to be addressed.”

Lupina Lara Elizondo , Visión de México y sus Artistas – Paralelismos en la Plástica de los Siglos XIX y XXII, Promotion of Mexican Art, Mexico, 2003

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