An exhibition catalogue from Roberto Cortázar‘s solo show, Saturn in the World of the Parricides, at the Museo Amparo. Including text by Pedro Ángel Palou and Miriam Jerade Dana.
“Known for his psychologically intense, precisely rendered portraits of anonymous nude figures that evoke an unsettling awareness of the self and of the transient nature of human relationships, Roberto Cortázar is one of the leading figurative painters of his generation in Mexico. Technically and thematically, his work brings together ideas and influences from a variety of sources, including, for instance, classic and realistic art (in the excellence of it craftsmanship) and the more free-spirited side of modernism (visible in the abstract passages that Cortázar has combined with figurative elements in his emblematic paintings of the past decade).
For Cortázar, each painting creation is never performed without some measure of soul-stirring drama. He often describes the art-making process as a constant cycle of creation and destruction. It is a process in which, for example, an artist may develop certain ideas about a work-in-progress, then decisively reject them, or apply paint to a surface and then scrape it all back off. […]
More recently, in his newest paintings of the last three years, which feature in the exhibition “Saturn in the World of the Parricides,” Cortázar has discovered –and revealed- his expressionistic side. His paintings formats have become larger, his composition more concentrated than ever. […]
Cortázar still packs a lot of meaning and technical virtuosity into his works, no matter how fleeting their meanings may seem, or how generally abstract his new paintings may feel. For an artist whose big theme had been the nature of power or control, Cortázar may be loosening up. During the process, he seems to be revealing in the discovery of another kind of power for the real subject of this restless artist’s latest creations ay well be the expressive power of paint itself.” – Miriam Jerade Dana, Roberto Cortázar, gesture and idea.
