Knowing Pedro Coronel

THE FIRE DANCERS

1958, Oil on canvas. 141 x 160 cm.

The almost totemic faces and the geometries of some of his paintings, such as The Fire dancers, reveal that Coronel was linked thematically to many concerns of the artists of the Mexican School, such as the pre-Columbian past and the presence of death.

The color divided into parcels, sizzling and contrasted present in his pieces is actually a chromatic proposal that draws on his cultural reality, but his treatment is absolutely daring and innovative.

Primitive dancers use moonlight and firelight as skillfully as modern choreographers use footlights and spotlights. The games of light and shadows that the dancers promote in front of the bonfire multiply the movements of the dance, extending towards a magical universe.

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PEDRO CORONEL

Zacatecas 1921 -Mexico city 1985.

Hello, my name is Pedro Coronel, and I was one of the most important Mexican artists of the 20th century.

I was born in the city of Zacatecas on March 25, 1921. My father, Pedro M. Coronel, was a tailor, my mother Juana Arroyo took care of her 11 children, I being the oldest. My paternal grandfather was a painter, so it is said that I had a family of artists. My mother played the mandolin, my father the clarinet and the violin. On Sundays, after mass and lunch, they played popular provincial music ..."

I made a close friendship with the town's puppeteer, he lived in the Redy Houses little street, I went to see him every day. Maybe he made me a sculptor. " At the end of 1939, my parents sent me to Mexico City to study sculpture. In 1940, I enrolled in the School of Sculpture and Direct Carving. My teachers were the sculptors Juan Cruz, Rómulo Rozo and Francisco Zúñiga. In 1942, after a student strike in which I participated, the school changed its name to the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving, known as "La Esmeralda", the learning systems were modified and a high-level faculty joined, such as: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Agustín Lazo, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Carlos Orozco Romero, among others, the last three being my painting teachers. I finished my studies in 1946 and stayed one more year at the school as a sculpture teacher.

The approach to these painters was decisive for me, especially my friendship with Diego Rivera, who from the beginning praised my sculpture, at one point, however Diego discouraged me from traveling to Europe, arguing that moving away from Mexico would make me lose my life. essence and roots of my country. I was surprised by his reaction because he had lived a very beautiful time in Paris, alongside Modigliani and other artists, so I did not understand how that man who, deep down, taught me to find the most direct way in my sculpture, the bases that are in pre-Hispanic sculpture, he suddenly refused for me to leave.

Thanks to his support, I managed to get an economic subsidy to travel to Paris, derived from the talks and lessons I taught at the school. In 1948 I went to New York where I stayed for a few days visiting museums and waiting for my ship to leave for France. Already in Paris I participated in the transcendent moment of the postwar period, I met artists, such as the Romanians Constantin Brancusi and Victor Brauner, the Soviets Serge Poliakoff and Ossip Zadkine, and the French painter Sonia Delaunay, all based in Paris. He frequented the workshop of the sculptor Brancusi who sought, among other aspects, the essence of form and at the same time had a great predilection for African and preColumbian sculpture.

I also met Octavio Paz, the poet, who became a very close friend of mine. I went to a retrospective exhibition of Paul Klee at the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, I was so impressed by the handling of color and I came away with the decision to start painting. In Klee's work, I discovered the freedom for shapes and colors to connect to the ancestral world indigenous to him, the key to a more pure, poetic and primitive creation.

In 1952 I returned to Mexico soaked in the experiences and precepts of the European artistic movements. I settled in Mexico City, being a neighbor of the writer Juan Rulfo, with whom I had a close and enriching friendship.

I had contact with the work of the painter Rufino Tamayo, a work that transformed me by finding fertile soil from which to drink and enrich my painting with strength and dynamism.

I passed away on March 23, 1985 in Mexico City at the age of 64 from a stroke, leaving an important legacy to Mexican art.