artnexus #2

The work of Francisco Toledo is synonymous with imagina-tion, richness, an awareness of context and the ability to interpret it with singular skills in a wide range of techniques, ranging from oil and watercolors to print-making, drawing, ceramics, sculpture and textiles.

Born in 1940 in the city of Juchitán, Oaxaca, Toledo became interested in painting from very early on. As he himself has said: “Perhaps I began to draw at the age of 10. I remember exercises we were given at school. I remember once painting on the walls of our house, where I did some drawings. And when the time came to paint our house, my father respected what I had done and took care not to paint over what I had drawn... When I arrived in Oaxaca they told my family that I could draw. There was an exhibition of Mexican art at that time and this was the first time I had ever seen painting or a real picture.*

The visual universe of Toledo is that of one of the most polifacetic contemporary Mexican artists. True to his origins and conscious of belonging to a culture and tradition with which he can identify, Toledo is profoundly concerned with

the interpretation of everyday reality, the cultural environment which he knows, examines and reworks from his own particular standpoint, endowning its figures with meanings which are also his own, making them richer and using codes which are an unending source of wonderment.

* Quoted by Carlos Monsivais in Pintado en México, 1983.

IVONNE PINI