Modern Mexican Masters August 22-September10

Eduardo Lazo Cantu and Gabriela Villareal Villareal
The Aktual Artists are a husband and wife team from Monterrey, Mexico who produce a variety of work under different pseudonyms. Each line of work has a different way of expressing the artists' intentions.
Eduardo Lazo Cantú was born in Monterrey, N.L., México on October 28, 1966. As a bo
y he was known by his ability to do realistic drawings, always with an artistic sensibility in his pen to capture different forms, mostly human ones. The serenity, by which he is identified, has made him to capture balance and harmony in his work.

Gabriela Villarreal Villarreal was born in Monterrey,N.L., México on October 22,1969. She is a restless artist always creating new forms and spaces, capturing color with lights and shapes, in a constant search of exhibiting works that talk by themselves with their own style. This artist has a dynamic personality since she grew up in an ideal environment for developing her creativity and artistic talent in the company of her mother and master, Gabriela Villarreal Santos, contemporaneous artist who has a great trajectory. Afterward, she grew up as an artist with other masters as Demian de la Rosa, Fernando Cervantes and Eliseo Portal Paste.


Monica Araoz - Artist's Statement
In order to define my art, I would need to create a name that would fit between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Although both of these currents are extremes, they also have similarities. Why can’t my art be in the middle of these?
For me, painting is a very internal and personal experience. I love painting because of the way I feel while I am painting; the process of creation is what captives me and certainly puts me in trance. I make no pretensions of showing my emotions and feelings through my art, but I do not stop these from emerging either.
To create my art, I try to emphasize the greatness of simplicity through a game of confronting fortuitous events with controlled and planned interventions. Both color and texture play a crucial role in doing this.

In my paintings, I use a mixture of sand, clay dust and acrylic mediums that, after applied, creates randomly heavy textures and finishes. I like to contrast this apparent randomness with a shape that evokes exactly the opposite – a planned, precise shape like a square or a rectangle. Then I confront this textured space with smooth surroundings. Looking again for contrast, I like to add an element on the top of this that links all of this together. This can be executed one of three ways: randomly created, planned, or a combination of both of these. Like a free will line dropped from the tube, a line created with texture, or a carved or painted stroke controlled by the artist's hand.
- Monica Araoz
   

Adrian Jesus Falcon
Adrian Jesus Falcon constructs his life from artistic principles and maintains a high productivity without losing the heart of what it means to be human. Falcon has expressed himself though art since a young age. Pursuing his passion for  art, he established a contemporary modern art gallery since 1999.
Employing oil paints with wood filler, glue, charcoal along with handmade materials and found objects. It is his ability to invest his paintings with many meanings. Therefore, emerging conflicting elements to form an abstracted environment. Texture is central over detail into the encounter between viewer and artwork.
The work is about expression and interpretation. Evoking both absence and presence at the same moment. Distorted forms and dynamic colors seek and feel the energy of life. Music being the main inspiration for his paintings, the sounds and moods drive emotions to transform to an aesthetic form of art. Robust paintings filled almost to the bursting point with rhythm and movement.
His work has been published in Gallery and Studio Magazine, and ARTnews Magazine. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and represented in private collections. Falcon’s work is also represented by Montserrat Gallery i
n New York, NY.

Many of Adrian's pieces are created using the indigenous Petate, hand-woven mats still made in Mexico
The petate was fundamental to our ancestors, both in life and in death. It was used to rest and sleep upon. Children were born into the world on a petate. Today the petate is considered a work of art, inheritance of our ancestors and traditions that are in danger of extinction. The "Petate" is a woven carpet of palm straw, which was common during the 19th century, and first decades of the 20th. The "Thrinax Morrissi", the botanical name of the palm, originally from Europe, where it grows wild, from whose center radial branches arise and form a fan. The center of this palm is hauled by hand and it is put to dry by space of several days, then soon to be dividde and the pleita or straw be weaved into strips which can measure up to 25 feet in length, depending on the size of the petate that is to be made.
In the past the people of limited resources used the petate to sleep. It was placed directly on the floor and had the quality to maintain freshness. Once the cot came into use, the petate was occurring other uses. For example, served as a base to dry coffee. For ancient Mexicans, "petatearse" meant to
 die, to abandon this world we know. Our ancestors prepared to leave this world through rituals, by preparing their own burial shroud, a funeral petate.
Yesterday's Mexicans had a place of privilege for the petate in their religious life. From the emperor to the most humble peasant, everyone was wrapped in a petate for burial. They returned to the earth beneath their mats of interwoven strands of palm. Petates were tied with bands colored by war paint, to inspire the dead on their perilous journey through the darkness of death on their way to Paradise.
For the Mayans and the Aztecs, the woven mat was a symbol of the royal families because the petates covered the thrones and floors of the palaces. The petate, or petlatl as it was called in the Náhuatl language, was admired and adopted for every day use by the conquistadors along with the hammock, another indigenous invention they found on their arrival.

The Mexican world tumbled with the conquest of Tenochtitlan by the Spaniards, who imposed European religion and language and remade the indigenous world. But, like so many other native customs and beliefs, the petate survived. During the Mexican Revolution, the peasant warriors of Zapata and Villa fought with petates on their backs. They slept and loved on those mats, and when they fell in battle as heroes, they were buried covered by a petate. After the Revolution, the traditional sense of Mexican identity was reborn. It flourished on canvas and murals painted by Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros. Diego Rivera included the petate in many of his images of the Mexican people. Rivera alluded to ancient beliefs, using the image of the petate strapped to the back of the people, as if this object were the symbol of their destiny, as if the circle of their existence opened and closed on a petate.

Artist Statement
I choose anonymity, in which each piece individually evokes diverse clarification. Therefore, initiating different interpretations.


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