Jorge González Camarena

(Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1908 – Mexico City, 1980)

The Mountain

n.d.

encaustic on Masonite

251 x 251 cm

Inv. no. CBB062

BBVA Collection Mexico



Jorge González Camarena belongs to the second generation of Mexican muralist artists, heavily inclined towards triumphalist allegories of history, visible in the dramatic tone of the artist’s own paintings. González Camarena was not one of the artists who offered sceptical versions of the ideological failure and the institutionalisation of the events of 1910 that vindicated the right to land and freedom from Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship.

His compositional method is based on a persuasive compact geometry, ornate drawing and a palette of earthy textures. He cultivated an interest in archaeology, technology and post-revolutionary nationalistic aesthetics.

With its colossal scale, this Mountain embodies a timeless cliché exploited by many artists from the nineteenth century onwards. With its varied and imposing landscape and volcanoes, Mexico provided them with a wide repertoire of tellurian metaphors of women’s features. Here, the enormous stone mass, maybe a barren wall, gives rise to a nude torso and a featureless face that responds to a grandiloquent narrative of national glory.