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X
PRESENT
MEMORIES OF THE VALLEY: THE STEPS OF JOSÉ MARÍA VELASCO
RESEARCH AND CREATION BY ANDRÉS RESÉNDIZ RODEA AND MARIE-CHRISTINE CAMUS
We could say that the concept of landscape itself...
...has changed radically since the 18th century.
The question is about the nature...
...of what's visible, the question is about looking...
...but not looking as a particular form of perception...
...or as a merely testimonial relationship...
...but as a creative intervention inside the space itself.
MEMORIES OF THE VALLEY: THE STEPS OF JOSÉ MARÍA VELASCO
In order to explore the landscape shape in Mexican arts...
...we'll start with José María Velasco's depiction of the Valley of Mexico.
Velasco is, undoubtedly, the most important 19th-century landscape painter...
...and has influenced the work of contemporary artists...
...who have painted the Valley of Mexico and Mexico City.
Why and how has Velasco's work influenced contemporary painting?
Where did this artist paint? What's left of those places?
How is the current city seen from there?
These questions made us travel back in time and space...
...to explore the steps of José María Velasco...
...in imagery and in contemporary art.
Velasco created his most notable paintings in the north of Mexico City...
...in the Sierra de Guadalupe, especially on Cerro Atzacoalco and Cerro de Santa Isabel.
Today, these hills emerge like islands of the memory...
...which survive in the middle of the urban sprawl.
They are motionless traces of the past, facing change.
We know this one as Vicente Guerrero.
The Cerro de Santa Isabel, as we call it now, is that hill over there.
Its name now is... Well, it's always been Cerro Zacatenco...
...but it was called Santa Isabel because...
...it was the Santa Isabel Tola neighborhood or town.
That's why it's not very easy to find.
That place looks familiar, just the way it is...
-With these rocks? -Yes. It might be...
...that part, where you can see that wall.
So it would be up there.
The aqueduct. Here, this is the aqueduct.
Yes, the aqueduct runs underneath.
-That's where it turns. -Yes.
The discovery of those places, lost in the middle of the sprawl...
...makes us realize the existence of a pure time, with no date...
...far from our world of drills and restoration.
A lost era we can find by means of art.
When seeing a Valley of Mexico landscape by José María Velasco...
...we have at least two impressions:
One is being before the image of a real space...
...created by nature, amazing, and which has now disappeared...
...and the other is seeing a monumental, impressive work of art.
But why and how do we get these impressions?
The natural landscape of the Valley of Mexico has always...
...caught the attention of foreign visitors.
In the 19th century, when they arrived and saw this view...
...they were amazed by the optical quality of the air.
It was so transparent that, as a lens...
...it affected visual perception...
...causing faraway objects to look closer and the colors to look vivid.
Velasco was able to capture this phenomenon in his work...
...by depicting the air of the heights in his paintings.
The painter remarkably represented orographical and botanical details...
...with scientific accuracy, which rendered his paintings more realistic.
It's important to remember that José María Velasco worked...
...with the Mexican Natural History Association as a researcher and illustrator...
...and carried out studies on flora and fauna...
...one of which would be an atlas of the flora of the Valley of Mexico.
...and then we go that way. It'll take about 20 minutes...
There's an avenue there, isn't there?
That's ahead of us. Then, the one where we're standing is this one, and...
...the one you mention is this one here.
It's that one.
Besides widening perspective...
...to show immensity confined among mountain ranges and volcanoes...
...and representing nature in an almost scientific way...
...the painter recovered the image of the basin...
...and depicted it as a geographic hole...
...as a motherly lap for the city, with a cavity and a womb.
Matria.
These efforts tried to find an identity image of Mexico.
The landscape, the clean air...
...the greatness of the valley and the basin...
...turned into symbols of our national identity...
...a Utopian vision of harmony and tranquility...
...that would leave political and social conflicts behind.
A vision that fitted Porfirio Díaz' State vision perfectly.
In the late 19th century...
...Velasco's work was widely known overseas.
His paintings were displayed in exhibitions in New Orleans, Chicago and Paris.
Besides attracting the public with his monumental landscapes...
...Díaz' government used those images to show other countries...
...the allegoric portrait of a strenghtened nation...
...where tradition and modernity co-existed.
In this sense, Velasco was the government's official painter...
...and the interpreter of a nation that craved the approval of the Europeans.
After an era with a notorious authoritarian government...
...and an exhausted and subjugated country...
...the first signs of social and political dissent started to appear...
...which lead to the Mexican Revolution.
Since the end of Díaz' government and during those troubled years...
...the idyllic image of our country, depicted by Velasco...
...ceased to exist.
Forgotten by the government and estranged from the Academy...
...José María Velasco died in 1912.
Among 19th-century painting...
...Velasco's work was the first to be re-discovered and valued again.
In 1942, after a cascade of positive reviews on Velasco's work...
...started by art critic Luis Islas García...
...and supported by Diego Rivera...
...Velasco was paid homage in the Fine Arts Palace...
...with a general exhibition of his work, organized by Carlos Pellicer.
This renewed interest in Velasco's work...
...is related to the desire to create a painting tradition...
...and to provide Mexican art with a golden past.
Another reason for this boost...
...was the appearance of the collectors' world...
...who were eager to increase the value of their assets.
José Guadalupe Posadas', Juan Cordero's...
...and Agustín Arrieta's work was recovered too.
Velasco had an influence on several 20th-century art movements...
...which took the Valley of Mexico as a basis for their work.
The most nostalgic artists...
...longed for the beauty and greatness of the Valley...
...while others, rather realistic and critical...
...questioned the changes brought by modern urban sprawl.
Other recent artists got ahold of Velasco's work...
...to reflect on the image itself.
Some nostalgic painters, like Luis Nishizawa and Luis Acosta...
...explore the Valley of Mexico with evident longing.
Echoing Velasco's work...
...they kept a natural, harmonious vision of the Valley...
...with clean air and open spaces...
...as if showing resistance against urban sprawl and modernity.
In these painters' work, the city is barely implied...
...as an attempt to stop the emerging visual corruption.
Natural landscapes are still a relevant element...
...in the search for a representative singularity of our space.
The preference for the outskirts, with plants and rocks, is evident.
There is longing for the beauty and calm of Velasco's landscapes...
...but the technique is different, and there are new points of view.
A second group of painters, who were part of the same generation...
...decided to abandon the romantic image...
...where nature was the core part of the painting...
...and took a more radical stand concerning urban changes.
To some of them, like Phil Kelly or *** Rabel...
...the city became a landscape: they walked in the streets...
...and painted a new space, with remarkable hustle and bustle.
Essentially, the city expands horizontally...
...the references to nature are lost, and the sight is led astray.
The elements that made up the singularity of Mexico City...
...like the air, the space, the visibility, are gone now.
Juan Villoro dubbed this sensation 'horizontal vertigo'...
...and its concept is depicted in the work of several painters from this time.
In this new vision of the Valley of Mexico...
...the last group of painters, the most recent ones...
...and where Daniel Lezama participated...
...took the most representative elements of Velasco's work...
...to own them and reflect on the nature of the image and the painting.
They make a contrast between the idyllic Valley...
...and the violence of reality.
They question the place Velasco's work has nowadays...
...in the visual discourse of the revolutionary nationalism.
It's not criticism of the artist's work...
...but of the ideological use of his paintings.
Some artists went to the places where Velasco worked...
...and they got the perspective of the 19th-century painter...
...to re-interpret his work.
In this process, Hugo Pérez and Carmen Parra Velasco...
...tried to retrieve the lost identity and create a new image.
Nowadays, the Valley of Mexico doesn't resemble the grand landscape...
...that Velasco painted...
...but the traces of the past are still there.
The landscape is the trail of humans on the territory...
...and at the same time, the territory turns into memory.
The current landscape is the sum of all the previous landscapes...
...and their social imagery.
The traces are unique: we see through them, and we see ourselves through them.
The paintings are traces of the place: they are memories.