Twelve years ago one of the most original Mexican painters of the 20th century died in Madrid. Based in Spain since 1991, Alfredo Castañeda was an author who created his own artistic language, unique, introspective and fantastic, to express a pictorial world in which he combined the real and the intangible.
Throughout his outstanding career, Alfredo Castañeda showed his exceptional talent. The importance of this author lies in the fact that his artistic proposal mixes elements that make his work continue to be valid today. His paintings have a spatial depth and a force of color that invade the viewer, taking him from a first sensory impact to a deeper experience, inviting him to look towards infinity. Each element of his compositions participates in an eloquent whole, in his works there is nothing accidental; Castañeda arranges everything with a balance between detail and the whole, a construction where color is supreme and its treatment deepens it as a constructive and compositional element, charged with strong emotionality and spirituality.
Castañeda’s painting, as Alberto Ruy Sánchez said, speaks of that spiritual yearning, of that need to embark on a journey or to already be on it. A journey known to be full of obstacles, unexpected encounters and new challenges.
The exhibition Tabletop with Alfredo Castañeda, which is presented at Casa Nuestra, in the former seat of the Senate of the Republic, is made up of more than 60 works, including oil paintings, drawings and graphic work, ranging from 1960 to 2010. The selection of pieces shows the great capacity as a painter and draftsman of this creator, while exploring his different plastic languages, in which a group of paintings created in Spain, never before seen in Mexico, stand out.
The curatorship of the exhibition, in charge of Marina Castañeda, the artist’s granddaughter, proposes a more intimate encounter, in which the public faces the work of Alfredo Castañeda, without following a chronology or a thematic order, to learn about the different lines of exploration through which he traveled over five decades. For this reason, it is raised from the concept of “desktop” and everything that can happen in the fact of sitting at a table.
Peeking into an artist’s studio is a special opportunity to get to know a small part of their world. His study meant the place where he could continue his pictorial work and it was also a space of silence and introspection; a creative temple, a school of thought to find sensitivity. Thus, in the exhibition this space is reconstructed thanks to some of the artist’s original objects, those of greatest interest, which allow us to discover his organization, his materials, his way of working or even his emotional or intellectual process.
Thirty-one years after he decided to change his place of residence to Madrid, this return of his work to Mexico means the opportunity for the public to once again approach an artist who owns a unique language, an author who lived an intensely creative life among two geographical spaces of fulfillment and dreams: Mexico and Spain.
BY BERNARDO NOVAL
CEO MUST WANTED GROUP
@BERNIENEVAL AND @MUSTWANTEDG
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