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José de Ibarra, the language of affect

Is it possible to know what someone is feeling just by looking at them? When we share others’ gestures and ways of seeing and behaving, that is, their cultural codes, we can discern the traces or evidence of affect in their expressions.

And if we could travel to the past, would we be able to recognize the gestures of men and women from another era?

If we are to appreciate art from other times, we must try to see it without any preconceived notions. In the eighteenth century, men and women felt, acted, loved, hated, desired, and feared with the same intensity that we do, but they expressed their ions using social and visual codes other than our own. Painting and literature can be keys for deciphering those emotional codes, some of which have been deactivated by the transformations wrought from living and socializing together.

One of the most important artists during the colonial era—before New Spain became Mexico—was José de Ibarra (1695-1756), whose art developed a system of rhetorical or persuasive images for representing emotions. His work and influence laid the bases for expressivity in painting among his contemporaries. Ibarra inherited this interest from his teachers and played a key role in training subsequent generations. Together he, his colleagues, and his disciples would repeat and perfect a shared pictorial language, that, in combination with great technical expertise, would dignify painting as a major art.

Demand for Ibarra’s works lifted his own prestige and that of painting in a growing art market, which consisted of well-to-do merchants, mine owners, hacienda owners, archbishops, intellectuals, and viceroys. The imperative to express their status drove them to commission the best painters to take their portraits and express their devotion.

This exhibition seeks to provide informative reflections on José de Ibarra’s role in promoting the modernization of pictorial techniques focused on affects—ions, emotions—and to familiarize visitors with the culture of Mexico’s colonial era. Our goal is to communicate the importance of this artist and his way of expressing affects through a systematized pictorial language that effectively conveyed the complexity of emotions.

Dra. Paula Mues Orts | Curator

Mtra. Berenice Pardo Hernández | Curator