Rafael Coronel

(Zacatecas, 1931 – Cuernavaca, Morelos, 2019)

Muchacho del mercado (Market Boy)

1965

oil on canvas

140 x 100 cm

Inv. no. CAB019

BBVA Collection Mexico



This sombre Market Boy dates from Rafael Coronel’s earlier period, perhaps the most intriguing phase in his practice. A use of dry oil paint, a yellowish-brown palette, sketchy figures, a glaucous sheen, chiaroscuro indebted to the Italian, Iberian and Dutch paintings he had recently discovered in Europe: these were the arms in the arsenal of a young man still fascinated by lowlife, pulque bars and brothels, the destitute at the La Merced market in Mexico City, and rats in the gutter.

Besides the denunciation of social decomposition that mobilised some artists during the Cold War period, Coronel adds humanism and, above all, the expressionist spirit he inherited from the muralist artist José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), as well as the conviction that beauty, always tottering on the frontier between spellbinding and repulsion, is born from putrefaction.