Javier Aranda Luna: Juan O'Gorman, an artist written in stone

TO

ever in the Museum del Prado, Juan O'Gorman entered the imposing room 12, where Las Meninas is exhibited. His attention was caught by a group of students listening attentively to their professor: this painting is one of the largest ever made in the world, and whoever doesn't like it is either Hottentot, stupid or mentally retarded . He followed the small group discreetly and when the professor finished his class he approached him and said: "I'm not Hottentot, stupid or mentally retarded, but it seems to me that Las Meninas, by the great master Velázquez, is the boredom of boredom."

O'Gorman never forgot the professor's response:

-Ah, you are not Spanish.

-No, I'm Mexican.

The very angry man said to him: No wonder .

According to O'Gorman, subjectivity beats at the heart of art. Whether it's the artist or the person who approaches a work of art. He was convinced that someone who looks at a landscape after suffering a loss registers something different than someone who hasn't. No two people see reality in the same way . Circumstances and needs determine our vision; our educational background, our love life, our dreams, joys, and fears.

His two great passions were painting and architecture, the pinnacle of art, the mother of all art . It is no coincidence that his most notable work, and the one for which he will be remembered, are the murals he created in the Central Library of the University City (CU). Four thousand square meters of a combination of painting and architecture: onyx skylights and an immense four-sided mural filled with symbols and nods to history. He used some 10,000 naturally colored stones brought from all over the country.

To an envious Siqueiros, who had experimented with techniques and materials all his life, they looked like a gringo dressed as a china poblana . To Luis Cardoza and Aragón, on the other hand, they seemed like the best murals in CU.

There are on its variegated surface images from the Borbonic and Mendoza codices; canoes, fish from lacustrine Mexico, hieroglyphs from Coyoacán and Iztapalapa, Xochimilco, Azcapotzalco, Tacuba; a Greek temple, a Christian temple, and a pyramid; Hernán Cortés and Friar Juan de Zumárraga; the heliocentric conception of Copernicus and the geocentric one of Ptolemy; the Sun, the Moon, the National Autonomous University of Mexico; the battles of the Conquest.

But the past encoded in symbols also corresponds to a future where the atom is the vertex of a new world. A world where the potential energy of minerals, plants, and animals will chart new paths.

Juan O'Gorman's artistic activity was incessant and highly rewarding: at 24, he built the first functional house inspired by the teachings of Le Corbusier and, later, in the same style, the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Studio House. He completed the Anahuacalli Museum, designed by his friend Diego Rivera; he painted oil paintings and murals such as the one depicting the History of Aviation and the one for the Ministry of Communications and Public Works; he built 26 elementary schools and the famous grotto-house built under the principles of organic architecture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. A world-renowned house he lived in and, when sold out of necessity by its buyer, a dim-witted or jealous artist, destroyed it. Damnatio memoriae? Does the owner of a work of art have the right to destroy it? How mediocre. Even the Nazis, for all their barbaric thinking, looted works of art, they didn't destroy them.

He devoted his final years to ecology. “When I study the animal world,” he commented to Cristina Pacheco a year before his death, “I wonder why it is that humans don't feel the need to conserve the environment in which they live. Animals behave more logically.” He took his thought to the extreme: “What importance can art have when we see the world ending, the earth depleting, the sea poisoning? What importance can art have in the face of such horrors?”

120 years after Juan O'Gorman's birth, his stony-colored murals and words live on.