MD-7

The trio of exhibitions at the Museo Rufino Tamayo, in Chapultepec Park, CDMX, was marvellous, enlightening, uplifting, cool and pretty damn fine – particularly the exhibition of works from the permanent collection. The pieces that were shown were amazing and broad in their reach, and the curation was lovely, as were the exhibition titles, like for this one: Archaic Futures.

As I have since come to learn, Rufino Tamayo was a well-established artist from Oaxaca who began acquiring works of his international contemporaries in the 1960s. The Tamayo Museum is an extension of his efforts to bring an impressive array of this work to the public.

During his travels around the world, Rufino Tamayo documented cultural relics, desert landscapes, and ancient ruins that are gathered in this show as an anthology of his own vision of the archaic. This interest was no coincidence – Tamayo was deeply engaged with ancestry, Mesoamerican cosmogony, spirituality, and the astral as universal principles to restore art's original value. His vision was not only reflected in his own work but also in the collection he assembled for this museum. A selection from this collection is presented in the exhibition alongside other Mexican collections.

From the exhibition blurb.

Miro's signature in the middle of the work is delightful!

What is it about modernist works that makes them so timeless? I suspect (I know) I am biased by having been exposed to modernism growing up, but still, there is something powerful and outside of time at work here... at least for me.

There was a lovely series of photographs of Rufino Tamayo's travels around the world, and perhaps there is a clue that lies here, in the state of the world at that time. Biased again, and wondering if an artist's sense of the world might have had a very different aspect in the 60s? A moment in which the world was opening up and yet still foreign and full of promise of some kind? When there was more time to reflect, speculate and marvel? – and more opportunity for baying at the moon?

I feel this same visceral and magical engagement in some contemporary art that I encounter, in particular contemporary African art, and I recognize that the spirit is alive and well... as one of the other exhibition titles aptly presents: El horizonte siempre se aleja (The horizon always walks away)... and from the blurb:

The title of this exhibition suggests that contemporaneity fosters the inevitable emergence of a surplus. When one strives to remain up-to-date with the totality of factors that comprise the present, a new situation always emerges that eludes any possibility of comprehension. Thus, it can be said that the horizon of a presentist model of thought always recedes.

From the exhibition blurb.

What do you think?

Bow wow wow!

As always, thanks for reading and indulging!
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