Settled in Mexico in 1949, since the 1950s Vicente Rojo has developed a vast production in which his pictorial, sculptural, and graphic design practices intersect. These medial flows, however, are the result of different processes of experimentation and observation, and not of an initially given condition.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the opposition between the art of politically engaged realism versus informalist geometric abstraction prevailed in artistic conversation. Rojo was soon identified as part of the latter group,[1] whose artistic developments were to be placed in an international conversation. [2 ]
Taking this framework into , it is possible to highlight the relevance of this piece due to the change in trajectory that it entailed in the development of the artist's language. It is from this piece, as the researcher Daniel Garza Usabiaga considers, that Rojo incorporates the strategies of graphic communication in his pictorial forms. It could be said that it would be a turning point between the languages of his until then dissociated professional practices to interweave and feed each other with their questions, as happened naturally in the visual culture of the time.
“It was around 1964 that a clearer relationship between Rojo's practice as a designer and a painter could begin to be detected. This relationship is described by the artist as a fortunate symbiosis between structure (design) and color (painting). In some 1964 works, geometric representations began to appear, clearly defined by areas of color, which he had already used in numerous designs up to that date (…). Bearing this perspective in mind, the painting Icon XXI (1964) is especially revealing," [3] explains Garza Usabiaga, who concludes his comment on the piece as follows: "These characteristics present in Rojo's work - his concern for 'quick glances,' immediate impact, and attention-seeking and memory-imprinting — were also indispensable components of postwar corporate logo design. The logos, like the title of the 1964 painting by Rojo, also sought to function as icons with a strong visual impression"
This fusion of languages, which marked a negotiation between the different practices of the artist, was to permeate later series such as the well-known Negations (started in 1971 and whose “T” shape was repeated, although with variations in the visual frames), which allowed him to doubly question the figure of the artist in the field of art and of the monotonous seriality in industrial production.
CGV- January, 2021
References:
Eder, Rita, Tiempo de fractura, El arte contemporáneo en el Museo de Arte Moderno de México durante la gestión de Helen Escobedo (1982-1984), UAM-UNAM, México, 2010.
Garza Usabiaga, Daniel, La máquina visual. Una revisión de las exposiciones del Museo de Arte Moderno 1964-1988, INBA/MAM, México, 2011.
Cuauhtémoc Medina y Amanda de la Garza, Vicente Rojo. Escrito / pintado, MUAC/UNAM, México, 2015.
Debroise, Olivier y Cuauhtémoc Medina (Eds), La era de la discrepancia. Arte y cultura visual en México, 1968-1997, UNAM/Turner, México, 2007. See the essay: Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Sistemas (más allá del llamado ‘geometrismo mexicano’)”, pp. 122-127.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-t7IA72dOo
[1]According to Daniel Garza Usabiaga, as early as the 1970s the notion of Mexican geometrism as a category was discussed in connection with the exhibition El geometrismo mexicana. A current trend that was carried out in 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art with Fernando Gamboa as director and in which Rojo was included. In response to it, a book was published that raises the issue of the character of Mexican geometric art and its relevance to other geometric developments in Latin America. “During the 1950s and 1960s, a trend emerged in Mexico in artistic production based on the geometric abstraction. In November 1976, the MAM organized the first exhibition that sought to present and systematize geometrism in Mexican art in the second half of the 20th century, and legitimized it as 'the most important movement that has emerged in Mexico after the great muralist movement'. Along with this exhibition, the UNAM Institute of Aesthetic Research prepared the book ´El geometrismo mexicano' with texts by Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, Juan Acha, Xavier Moyssen, Jorge Alberto Manrique and Teresa del Conde”. Garza Usabiaga, Daniel, La máquina visual. Una revisión de las exhibition del Museo de Arte Moderno 1964-1988, INBA/MAM, México, 2011. p. 131.
[2] Regarding the relationship with the geometric abstractionism spread across Latin America, according to the historian Rita Eder, in the 1970s it was tangible that “there was a tradition of geometric art in Mexico visible in the out-of-field minimalism of Mathias Goeritz and the geometric conceptual works of Vicente Rojo, Negations, and in the same vein, Multiple Space by Manuel Felguerez. These works already gave notice in the Mexican sphere of the awareness of the theoretical and intellectual content of minimalism." Eder, Rita, Tiempo de fractura, El arte contemporáneo en el Museo de Arte Moderno de México durante la gestión de Helen Escobedo (1982-1984), UAM-UNAM, México, 2010. p. 53.
[3] Daniel Garza Usabiaga, “T Negaciones: pintura, diseño gráfico y cultura visual corporativa de la posguerra”, p. 161, in: Cuauhtémoc Medina y Amanda de la Garza, Vicente Rojo. Escrito / pintado, MUAC/UNAM, México, 2015.
