Año 1 luna

Born in Zacatecas, Coronel rose to prominence in postwar Mexico as one of the Generación de la Ruptura, the breakaway group of young artists who challenged the long dominant Mural tradition. The Ruptura artists privileged subjectivity, turning to lyrical and expressive abstraction as they distanced themselves from the social politics and nationalism of the Mexican School. Coronel first traveled to Paris in 1948, and he soon began to adapt the modernist language of the historical avant-garde—notably Constantin Brancusi, Victor Brauner, and Sonia Delaunay—in vibrant canvases that explored cosmic and natural worlds, indigenous and universal mythologies. “At the same time that he reclaimed the deepest roots of pre-Columbian Mexico,” curator Laura González Matute has remarked, he brought together “the enigmatic expressions of the final tendencies of the universal vanguard, Cubism, Expressionism, Orfism, abstraction, and geometry” and conjugated them “with the primitivist, synthetic forms of African and Asian cultures” (“Color, textura y magia en la obra de Pedro Coronel,” Pedro Coronel: Retrospectiva, exh. cat., Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, 2005, p. 18). In 1959, Coronel won the First Prize at Mexico’s First National Salon of Painting—a coup for the Ruptura generation and a bellwether for abstraction—and he found success at home and abroad over the following decades, exhibiting across Europe, the Americas, and in Japan.
Coronel returned to Europe frequently during his career, and he settled in Rome in mid-1968, staying there through the following year. The present Año 1 Luna belongs to a dazzling group of Roman paintings “composed with multicolored planes that construct ideal imagined forms, round, oval, piercing, fragmented, aggressive, or calm,” remarked the critic Justino Fernández. “The painter wanted the color to speak for itself, and he has achieved that to the fullest extent, in the highest tonality,” he continued. “Pedro Coronel ‘has hit the nail on the head,’ in my opinion at the present time, contracting painting to its two essential components, line and color; in them is his strength, his bravery, his passion.” Año 1 Luna shares the lunar sensibility and brilliant palette of a related series of works, titled Año 1 Luna, that Coronel made while in Rome and exhibited at the Museo de Arte Moderno, in Mexico City, upon his return to Mexico in 1970. Fluid, biomorphic shapes float in the painting’s shallow space, their forms overlapping and their acid colors—green, blue, yellow, orange, pink, purple—hard-edged and incandescent. The image conjures origins both celestial and cellular, distilling its theme to tones and essences of color, the ultimate subject of his painting. “There is spontaneity, but deliberation in everything,” Fernández concluded. “Coronel has stripped himself of all superfluity to keep the essential possibilities of his being…That is his greatness and at the same time his drama” (Pedro Coronel: pintor y escultor, Mexico City, 1971, pp. 62-3).
“For Coronel, painting is signification, which is to say matter transfigured by man,” reflected the poet Octavio Paz. “Coronel conceives painting as a constellation of signs, as a language. Yet it is a language that is still in the process of constituting itself, transforming itself from raw into animate material, recovering its autonomy, and freeing itself from its creator. Coronel is not a medium, but a means. Painting, poetry use Coronel to manifest themselves. . . . The work gives him (gives us) another existence” (Pedro Coronel: tableaux et sculptures, exh. cat., Le Point Cardinal, Paris, 1961, n.p.). In the polychrome planes of Año 1 Luna, color finds its purest and ultimate expression, auguring a new sense of being and possibility within a phenomenal cosmography of creation.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park