“He dedicado mi vida a la pintura y mi compromiso por mi arte y obras son lo que me da vitalized. Me da fuerza...animo...orgasmos...inspiracion...y amor”

                                               - Diego Gutiérrez Monterrubio, McAllen, Texas, 2010

 

 

It is human nature to seek out and attach meaning to the unknown.  A visual language in its crude form can manifest itself into an endless amount of meaning. My recent body of work titled The Images of my Infancy: A Visual Memory is a series of large, multi-faceted paintings illustrating various aspects of my life through memory retention, recall, and nostalgia.  In these works, I use the format of illustration painting, a training bestowed to me from my late grandfather, an illustrator for Coca-Cola in México for 40 years. In association with cultural and the internal cognizance to depict quotidian subjects, I am attempting to conjure a nostalgic juxtaposition from a happening that might be experienced or lived out on a daily basis. Most recently, the themes of these paintings have veered toward domestic subject matter, focusing on Mexican childhood games, foods, toys, and various personal experiences. At this time in my life, I am also influenced by Mexican tradition by means of symbols and icons, such as decorative pottery, murals, and pop culture illustration that is painted in flat patterns in a folk style.  I’m interested in the idea of autonomy both in the sense of being one self, with concomitant associations of one’s history and encounters, and in the habits and personality traits bequeathed through heredity. These works, almost as still life as figure compositions, are objects that represent the fuel of my infancy and adolescence and create a language that is visual and semiotic.

 

Reminiscing the moments of your earliest childhood can be joyful and blissful or they can be cruel shocking events depending on how your experience materialized. Mine was both feliz y triste. The inhabitants of my upbringing have become both critical in direction and focus of my vision as a person and artist. My MFA graduate art works are reflections of where I lived and the images I was saturated with. As a youth, I was exposed to the rich folklore of México, which have now influenced my images, such as how i saw all natural forms as beings, including pastimes and periodicals with their relatively crude execution and their simple, flat and pop-like imagery.  Whether playing Mexican card games or marbles with childhood friends, listening to boleros with my grandfather in his studio, or just working in a painterly and loose fashion, my formative years will now come to life with this series of paintings from memory and icons that to some people may seem surreal, but to me, they existed. Influenced by the mind of Joseph Cornell for its constructivism and nostalgia, the paintings of James Rosenquist for its odd juxtaposition of themes and styles, Joan Miró for his surrealist thinking and the influence of Pop Art in my art work, this graduate experience has evolved as the art work continued to become visible on the canvas and panels.

 

The images I’m working  with are crowded with forms; which are gradually simplified and altered down greatly, using geometric divisions and side-by-side gestures in the compositions and sensibility  inspired by Rosenquist and Cornell.  At this time I moved further away from his points of departure, and began using unusual sources and techniques, such as a childhood dreams and thoughts influenced by the Surrealist rational of Miro.

 

 “Explore the flashes of your memory”, my grandfather would say. As I continue to work on this series, my memory has become loose, raw, and playful. The images teetered on the cusp of balance and peculiar, and then slowly surfaced into something more 2 dimensional with flashes into 3 dimensional ideas. The paintings began to distill themselves and create clarity in my nostalgia. They became the “flashes” that we have as adults of our childhood memories. It was at this fracture I decided to continue this intuitive approach of “flash” painting. I began researching the places, the foods, the significant moments of my childhood memories and began to paint reflections of this not so distant time.

 

I  began experimenting with “flash” images and ideas using pictures of ordinary objects such as household utensils, bicycles, playing cards, and my pirinola (dredle), my most prized childhood possession as a talisman to help assist with my memory recall. This period of experimentation helped me to alter some lingering traditional practices, and eliminate usual habits of working from this state. By using objects of my adolescence, I was able to concentrate on the abstract qualities of the objects, rather than their associated meanings or emotions, allowing for more formal freedom; the viewer also is less able to attach literal meanings to the images. These "neutral" subjects or gestures with little aesthetic value or significance take the attention away from subject matter and toward the forms and content in the image.

 

After creating these “collages” like Miro,  I make a painting of the collage - transferring a flat collage image onto the equally flat canvas. These paintings from the collages are highly refined and graphic images, and even though at times they contain no identifiable subject matter or semiotic ideas,  the paintings do contain content, or meaning. Cornell believed that there were moments crystallized in feelings from the past.  My intention is to convey this thread of reminiscence  through images that interpret my visual language that are “crystallized” through memory retention, recall, and nostalgia.  At this time, I continue in this sentimental method of painting of reliving the past through “flashes” because in the words of my grandmother, “recordar, es vivir”…to remember is to live…and I choose to remember and live through paint.
 

 

Diego Gutierrez Monterrubio