Rodolfo Morales (1925-2001)

Galería Estela Shapiro, Mexico City
Private Collection, Mexico City
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Latin American Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture and Prints, November 18, 1991, lot 72, illustrated in color
Mary-Anne Martin/Fine Art, New York

There are no signs of inpainting or retouches under UV light inspection. This work is in excellent condition.
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Born to working class parents in the small town of Ocotlán de Morelos in the state of Oxacaca, Rodolfo Morales's oneiric and melancholic paintings are poetic musings inspired by his childhood recollections and enduring love for the region's indigenous people, its popular traditions, and its natural beauty. And, although Morales lived in Mexico City for over thirty years where he taught at the prestigious Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, in 1985 he returned to Oaxaca where he continued to devote himself to painting and to spearheading a number of charitable efforts to preserve the regions architectural landmarks and natural resources. As a key member of the School of Oaxaca, which includes such notable artists as Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo, Morales' paintings possesses a "naïve," surreal-like quality heavily informed by folk traditions not unlike the images created by the Mexican painter María Izquierdo and the Russian-French artist Marc Chagall. Like the aforementioned artists, for Morales the past and the world of dreams are recreated through the veil of memory and imbue his paintings with a fantastical, otherworldly quality.

 

In Retorno al pasado, Morales paints a familiar scene that evinces a "dream-like reality" that celebrates small town values while honoring women and his familial past. Rendered in a rich palette that suggests the bright colors one encounters in Oaxaca's local markets, colonial buildings and in its varied flora, an aura of nostalgia and yearning permeates the scene. Morales 'naïve" like approach disposes of traditional linear perspective and instead reveals a stage-like setting populated by floating heads of women, a lone female figure with disproportionately large hands embracing a seemingly infinitesimal number of heads, and an image of the artist's childhood home in Octolán. The presence of a number of empty chairs in differing sizes and scales function as stand-ins for his familial ancestors, while a veiled female 'bride" head further underscores the themes of ritual, melancholy, and the desire to return to the simpler values and traditions of the past. Morales once famously stated that, "Mexico would be lost without the steadfast work of women. They bear the burden of day-to-day living and find solutions to those problems which men simply resign themselves." In Retorno al pasado, Morales not only pays tribute to the role of women as caretakers and nurtures, but also equally posits their significance as the keepers of memory–the bridge between the past and the present.

 

—Marysol Nieves, independent curator based in New York