▲ Taking risks (2007), oil on canvas that is part of the exhibition Alfredo Castañeda, painter of poetry.Photo Armando Tejeda
▲ At the crossroads of all my senses (1990), oil on canvas that is part of the exhibition Alfredo Castañeda, painter of poetry.Photo Armando Tejeda
Armando G. Tejeda
Correspondent
La Jornada Newspaper
Thursday June 13, 2024, p. 3
Madrid. The Casa de América in Madrid inaugurated a large exhibition of the Mexican surrealist artist Alfredo Castañeda, a creator of dream worlds who, in addition to capturing them on canvas, also transferred them to literature, keeping his status as a poet almost secret. Hence the exhibition Alfredo Castañeda, painter of poetryin which through 45 plastic works and dozens of texts, those two worlds that always inhabited him intermingle and that explain even better his overflowing imagination and intoxicating daydream.
Alfredo Castañeda was born in Mexico City in 1930 and died in Madrid in 2010, after having spent the last years of his life in the Spanish capital, where he settled with part of his family and where he went daily to his workshop to keep creating. The last exhibition held in Madrid by the Mexican artist was in March 2020, at the Casa de México in Madrid, just when the covid-19 pandemic broke out and public cultural centers had to be closed. It was on display for several months, but without people, and when security measures were relaxed very few came to see it.
Marina Castañeda, in addition to being the artist’s granddaughter, is the curator of the Casa de América exhibition. The project was born while he was searching with his grandmother Hortensia, the painter’s inseparable companion, among the files and private notebooks that she had left in his studio. There he found dozens, hundreds of written texts, almost all of them poems, that were communicating in some way with the works he was doing at that time or that had to do with his readings, since Alfredo Castañeda was a person who was interested in many themes, but especially in mystical poetry, hence among his favorite books were the works of San Juan de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Santa Teresa and Fernando Pessoa.
As her granddaughter explained to The Day, The exhibition communicates those two universes that he always cultivated, that of painting and his surrealist daydreams, and that of poetry, in which he shows himself as he was, with his sense of humor, with his existential concerns and, of course, with his deep spirituality. Well, if Alfredo Castañeda was anything, he was a spiritual being.
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The exhibition, which can be visited from today until September 7, offers a tour of the work of the Mexican artist from his earliest works, at the dawn of the 1960s, to his latest ones, from 2010, the year of his death.
Most of the works on display are part of his family’s private collection, although there are some that belong to private collections or are on loan in public museums, including Message, With the escaped signs, Eastern Council, precise moment, The good way and The little king.
Castañeda, in addition to his artistic career, was recognized for his work as a writer and illustrator. He shared style with several creators who also explored surrealism and symbolism in his works. Among the most notable are Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Rufino Tamayo and even Giorgio de Chirico.
The Mexican academic Gonzalo Celorio also wrote a text for the exhibition, in which he warns that “I have resorted to the Mexican lyrical tradition to talk about the pictorial work of Alfredo Castañeda not only because he also practices poetry, but because his painting is poetic. in the broadest sense of the word: its beauty – which can also be convulsive, as André Breton wanted – provokes in the viewer, like all true poetry, an ineffable response that illuminates with pristine clarity the dark areas of the soul.”
And he also reflects on what was one of Castañeda’s own creative drivers, the search for silence: I have put into words what should have remained silent. The resonances of his works in each of those who look at them are inscrutable. Paradoxically, the infinite diversity of views constitutes the depth of its silent primordial significance.
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