Leonardo Nierman

(Mexico City, 1932)

Untitled

n.d.

silkscreen on paper (40/150)

60 x 80 cm

Inv. no. CBB291

BBVA Collection Mexico



Besides painting and sculpture, Leonardo Nierman also created stained-glass works and tapestries. Like the Swiss artist Max Ernst (1891-1976), whose mineral landscapes he admired, Nierman had wanted to be a musician, but instead studied physics and mathematics. His early works contain the seed of the stellar turmoil of his painterly endeavour to capture the cosmos, a subject matter he would explore in future decades and would turn him into a stalwart of
in Mexico.

For Nierman, painting opens a fissure that affords us an entry to a world dominated by a tempest of emotions and daunting revelations. In his perceptive rationale, matter reaches a state of incandescence that gives rise to a flaring body redolent of the chaos of the beginning of the world. Macrocosms and microcosms converge in images that pursue the experience of bedazzlement in front of lightning or the emergence of solar flames inside seas.

The evocation of phenomena of explosions of physical matter, a true challenge of visually translating the stellar flare-up of the cosmos, discloses considerable formal similarities with some members of the El Paso group.