Carlos Orozco Romero

(Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1896 – Mexico City, 1984)

Mexican Landscape

1944

oil on canvas

102 x 161 cm

Inv. no. CCB110

BBVA Collection Mexico



Carlos Orozco worked at the intersection of lucid phantasmagoria and geometric synthesis, fields which he explored with refinement and subtlety, filtered through the optic of Surrealism and
, whose vocabularies he had assimilated, as well as folk elements, including motifs borrowed from Jalisco handcrafts, like the articulated puppets that inspired the artist’s signature ghostly creatures.

Apart from his favourite subject matters—worldly or indigenist female portraiture and, to a lesser extent, still-life painting—landscape occupied a significant place in his practice. In this painting, he evoked the sombre narrow valleys of Jalisco. The pyramidal or layered composition and the almost monochromatic clay-like palette underscore the magnificent stone architecture, whose grey-green slopes end in a plateau with a blue lake that gives the painting a haven of peace. In Orozco’s painting, nature is a mountainous reality tinged with fantasy.