VIEWING ROOM "DEATH"

Death

Mexicans abroad are culturally linked to death; even among ourselves, we boast of this deep root, not only in the collective unconscious of our people but also in a real and full awareness of the extreme violence experienced in our country with exorbitant figures of the dead and disappeared. And yet, we continue to celebrate the vision of this deeply rooted tradition in such a particular way because the inheritance of its legacy contains origins and precepts so ancient that they are capable of neutralizing that dramatic and dark part.

In Mexico, the tradition of death is seen and experienced differently according to the region you are in; its folklore represents one of the most important vital structures of the syncretism between the indigenous past and the arrival of the Spanish, which remains alive through our miscegenation. While in the communities of central and southern Mexico the amalgam of these two cultures has remained balanced, even with a greater tendency towards indigenous customs and their historical ancestral wealth, in the North, on the contrary, we practically renounced that local indigenous heritage because our more primitive and elemental tribes did not have as much sociocultural weight in the construction of our societies. In the northern Mexican states where I come from, the folklore and traditions are simple and with uprooted pre-Hispanic identities, which makes it difficult to keep native customs latent. Our Indian vestiges have barely communicated their increasingly extinct legacy through a language that feels more ancient and rudimentary from the precariousness of the desert and the rugged mountains. In the North, the tribes of our ancestors practically suffered extinction, and their absence was replaced without resistance by the new dominant New Spanish beliefs of Creoles and Mestizos and their Renaissance and Scholastic customs and thoughts.

Through this description, I intend to somehow explain how our origins and their anthropological circumstances influence our contemporary vision of what we want to transmit...

My parents followed the tradition of taking flowers to their deceased; they attended the cemetery on the Day of the Dead each year without any ostentation that resembled those replicated in other regions of Mexico that overflowed with folklore. In the neighborhoods of Durango, when people died, they were watched over in their homes with open doors so that neighbors could participate with prayers and condolences, and also so that children could see the face of the dead as part of life. As a child, the corners of the house were refuges for imagining, especially a small abandoned room that my parents allowed me to clean and tidy up to turn it into a storage room where I placed shelves with jars that classified a collection of insects and plants—my memories... I collected that inert world in abandoned houses and vacant lots... after school or during summer vacations, it was common to find dead dogs and cats with their seven lives exhausted. On the rooftops and climbing high tree branches, I liked to watch the horizon full of hills and the church steeples while insects buzzed around me and I listened to the birds sing. All of Durango was full of birds; I suppose, like everywhere, the birds flew and kept the sky from seeming static... There were so many birds that children killed them playing with their slingshots; I once tried and intentionally missed the shot... I could never do it...

In her hands, she, who is nude, is Death; she carries an inert bird that will no longer sing... Vanitas.

Over the years, I feel more honest if I practice what I believe in, attempting to construct concepts with which my nature and instincts truly feel identified; I no longer strive so hard to pretend to understand knowledge for which I was not born. I try to maintain coherence between the beliefs of my personal life and the congruence of painting a reality, not only with a contemporary realistic style but also with a genuine narrative of my thought, so as not to provoke a sensation of artificiality or pretentious falsity. My own idea of death is ethereal, being more of an existential reflection that is supported by my belief in God but also in loss and the realistic and objective fact of no longer having life. But to represent this concept and personify it, in the Spanish-speaking world, our language overwhelmingly grants it a feminine form; therefore, in our New Spanish world that has been the foundation of Mexicans, we pronounce death as a woman…

Death (2017) is a painting that attempts to convey a sensation similar to what we experience when we see a sequence shot in a film, but in this case, without movement. Its panoramic vision is arranged so that the spectator experiences the sensation of being part of the environment in the scene themself... observing how the twilight illumination descends and presents the main character in the foreground, whose purpose is to show the concept that titles the work reflected in a dead bird. To transmit the synthesis of the thought I have accumulated in my life about death and its influences in a painting, I have created a composition with two main horizontal bands; the luminous and colorful upper one with the trees represents my ancient indigenous heritage... and the lower one is sober and refers to the legacy of the old Eurasian world.

Between these two planes, chiaroscuros are distributed and intermingled, alluding to New Spanish miscegenation; the protagonist figure is arranged vertically between the two bands, reinforcing the idea that its meaning is the product of both in a syncretism.

The work's narrative is intimate and humanist, proposing the sensory contemplation of a scene that wants to convey the true simplicity of the concept of death.

–Edgar Mendoza