Neo-Surrealism & Magic Realism: A Conversation: San Antonio

In Homenaje a Sigmund Freud, Friedeberg honors Freud’s psychoanalysis theory, a source of great inspiration for Surrealists. Combining the old, the new, and the strange, Friedeberg composes a gilded wooden rocking horse and a red and blue bust of Freud nestled inside a wooden frame with feet.  In traditional Surrealist fashion, Friedeberg states, “Who knows what one does or why? I think of my work as a pastiche. There’s a little bit of everything I like in there.”

Luis Gal was born and raised in Mexico City, and received his artistic training in France. The artist learned the painting technique of encaustic during his time in France. This very old technique uses cold wax mixed with pigment, and was popularized in the Renaissance. His colors translate the essence of things, the landscapes and the beings he loves, while at the same time attesting to his emotions,an exercise in artfully disguised melancholy. His paintings are quiet, slow, deliberate and poetic.

 

"Gal takes us on a journey through a new side of Mexico with the soft and dreamlike environments that he creates.The artist occupies himself with a subject matter that is at the same time alive and vulnerable; he celebrates forms but he also records the corrosive passage of the hours. ” – Juan Villoro

Rodolfo Morales is best known for vividly colored, dreamlike images that portray everyday peasant life. He is celebrated as a prolific painter of Mexican village life who merged aspects of surrealism with magic realism. The artist stated, "Nostalgia and melancholy are very important to me.” He often said he derived great satisfaction from watching others find something of themselves in his mystical settings. Until his death, he was considered one of the greatest living Mexican artists.

Through fantastical multicultural themes, Juan Alcazar explores all kinds of diversity in his work. From Greek Mythology to Mythological beasts of Mesoamerica like the Nahuatl, a shapeshifting wizard who can take various forms, Alcazar is interested in touching the viewer by creating artistic experiences that have hearts, souls, and tell stories beyond readymade myths. 

Patssi Valdez's paintings and graphics are brightly colored and often emotive with a sense of magical realism woven in. In Cactus Queen, Valdez captures an indigenous woman dressed in an ornate red gown and cactus crown standing in a desert landscape framed by saguaros, prickly pear cactus pads, and the night sky. The illusion of a frame creates a sense of theatricality and pageantry, in which this empowered woman reigns supreme. A Chicano art icon, Valdez has been internationally recognized for her pioneering artwork that uses magic realism to reject negative representations of the Latinx community. The artist states, “Nothing in the world is static. Nothing is solid. Everything is always in flux and in motion.”

Before the COVID-19 pandemic RF Alvarez' work focused on "depictions of abstracted, anonymous figures in these Eden-like spaces: dreams of some alternate reality where bodies are confident and comfortable, heritages are blended, nature is lush and overgrown. These depictions were allegorical – mythical even – something to strive for, or perhaps hold our own reality up for juxtaposition." Now the artist states, "I’ve moved away from allegory, turned the lens onto the room I dream in rather than the dream itself. What dreams I do paint are distant now, faded, almost coming undone the longer time passes..." Alvarez' recent work is an example of how a pandemic affects a studio practice.

Described as an "eccentric visionary," Bruno Andrade opens a world of Matisse-like color and memory based reproductions fueled by aesthetics and a sense of abstraction. Andrade depicts the natural world as an experience that echoes with wonder and realism. 

Victor Chaca's work deals with the circus of life, both thematically and in pictorial terms. He comes from a family of carpenters and "Chaca" in fact means carpenter in Zapotec. He frequently includes imagery from that profession: chairs and ladders play a very important role. Unlike Max Beckman, the German Expressionist painter whom the artist admires, Chaca does not see the world as a tragedy of man's inhumanity to man. He sees life as a merry-go-round and carnival of human chaos.