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Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt: Artistic Approaches to the Igneous Landscape (2023)
Curatorial Assistant: Sully Mitrani Contente
Museo de Arte Moderno, Ciudad de México
Artists:
Adela Goldbard, Aldo Álvarez Tostado, Alonso Cedillo, Artemio Rodríguez, Circe Irasema, Emilio Chapela, Ernesto Solana, Germán Venegas, Interspecifics, Israel Urmeer, Marco Rountree, Marcos Castro, Mariana Paniagua, Mariana Dellekamp, Pablo López Luz, Pedro Reyes, Sofía Echeverri, Tania Ximena.
Historical works by: Alice Rahon, Armando Salas Portugal, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Gerardo Murillo “Dr. Atl”, Luis Ortiz Monasterio, José Clemente Orozco, Felipe Guerra, José María Velasco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jorge González Camarena, Juan O’Gorman, Diego Rivera, Alfredo Zalce, Raymundo Martínez, Carlos Orozco Romero, Max Cetto, Luis Nishizawa.
Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. Artistic Approaches to the Igneous Landscape underscores the complex relationships that human beings establish with natural entities and how these play a decisive role in the formation of culture. In the case of Mexico, the relationship with the volcanic motif is particularly notable. There exists a vast legacy of volcanic representations that extends from the pre-European contact period, through nineteenth- and twentieth-century modern art, and into contemporary artistic production. This constitutes an unusual tradition within a global context, largely explained by the country’s orography: Mexico is traversed by a powerful volcanic mountain range that has captured the attention and stimulated the imagination of those who inhabit this territory.
Approaching the figure of the volcano through the category of paisaje ígneo encompasses representations of erupting or dormant craters, their fields of petrified lava and surrounding ecosystems, as well as their effects on social, cultural, and historical dimensions. This group of works—produced between the eighteenth century and the present—presents landscape as a geophysical phenomenon endowed with symbolic potential that generates discussions beyond the field of the natural sciences or scientific study. The works also reveal the plasticity of the volcanic motif, both in the multiple meanings they evoke and in the formal solutions they propose.
With the birth of Paricutín in 1943, the origin and evolution of a volcano were documented for the first time in history. Its activity captured the attention of numerous artists, who represented it in diverse ways and, in doing so, reactivated the volcanic motif. The complex sociopolitical context of those years fostered everything from the production of exalted images with strong nationalist rhetoric to aesthetic approaches to volcanic destruction as a metaphor for the violence that struck the world in the mid-twentieth century. The eruption of Paricutín was also instrumentalized by an emerging transnational culture of consumption and entertainment, which framed it as a natural spectacle. The narratives and references that this volcano has generated reveal the relentless force of nature and its enduring relevance in artistic practice and creative processes over the past eight decades.