Javier De la Garza

(Tampico, Tamaulipas, 1954)

19th Century Ceramics (19th Century Ceramics)

1995

oil on canvas

105 x 144 cm

Inv. no. CFB012

BBVA Collection Mexico



In retrospective, and largely thanks to the scintillating drama and erotic bulimia with which he approached his pastiches, Javier de la Garza—together with Julio Galán (1959-2006) and Nahúm B. Zenil (1947)—is one of the few to survive the shipwreck of the
movement. He managed to eschew the complacency which many of his colleagues fell victim to, falling back on a recycling of nationalistic rhetoric and to a certain opportunism in relation to the new art market opening up in the USA, following the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, avid for exoticism.

In this 19th Century Ceramics, Javier de la Garza gets rid of his customary props made up by agaves, watermelons, Saltillo serapes, charro sombreros, raw cotton clothes and the heroic national flag. This oil painting is, however, consistent with the artist’s penchant for exploring atavistic tastes, in this case using the still life, a genre already seen as anachronistic in the late twentieth century. The apparent decorative simplicity of the domestic utensils of provincial taste, and the intense indigo palette enhancing the glazed clay volumes, are divested here of any folkloric charge thanks to the geometric outline that opens up a vanishing point towards a background rendered almost like wallpaper, printed with a newspaper cutting allusive to the crisis of the government of President Salinas de Gortari, threatened by the 1994 Zapatista rebellion.