Germán Venegas
(La Magdalena Tlatlauquitepec, Puebla, 1959)
Masks
1987
mixed media on paper
84.3 x 103.4 cm
Inv. no. CCB182
BBVA Collection Mexico
In the words of the art critic Teresa del Conde, “Germán Venegas is an artist highly representative of his time. A time when cosmovisions and utopias are viewed irreverently and perhaps also with a certain sense of nostalgia. A time that, rather than continuity, offers shreds of a vast arsenal of signs which is possible to revisit without establishing hierarchies.”
Masks by Germán Venegas could well bear the word pandemonium as a subtitle. Venegas can be grotesque and macabre, and he is not afraid of putting saints and martyrs alongside pre-Hispanic gods, of coupling pagan myths with Christian iconography.
In Masks we can discern something of the carnivals painted by the Belgian artist James Ensor (1860-1949). However, in Venegas’ work the grotesque does not overrule his carefree and at once playful drawing, which instils a sense of balance and integrates space and volume. Similarly, the aphrodisiacal bustling forms reveal an assimilation of the most libertarian art sources in post-war history (, , ). The coarse, hurried drawing of the faces and the explosive, “dirtied” palette confer this work a premeditated cacophonic appearance that does not conceal its undercurrent of fatality and violence. The appropriation, annotation and recycling of atavistic images, ground together into highly exuberant and variegated baroque renditions, was an eclectic practice popular in the 1980s and 1990s. That primitivist phase was followed by an existential crisis, that led Venegas to discover Buddhism, an experience that propelled him to a maturity brought about by spiritual quest.
