Aurel de Coloblo Mendoza (1976), is an artist of French origin. Through his tour of different countries, and already installed in Mexico since 2012, he has developed a plastic and installation proposal in which he sets situations about the territory, the traffic, the city, the affections and the tradition. His visual discourse shows a vital connection with nature as the origin of the world and as the central axis, to which social and family relationships are anchored, from an ethical and ecological point of view.  

His plastic artwork is defined by a graphic sense, with the predominance of the free line and color, in balance with the white of the support. The drawings of organic forms present a delicate and strong stylization at the same time. In his artistic proposition he integrates a vision about the retrieval of the primitive, of the interconnections of all manifestations of life, with a playful, deep and thoughtful approach. 

He often uses paper as a backing, pencils, acrylics and pigments, as in the Another day and Call for family series. The artist states about Another day: “‘A minute ago it seemed that what I had done was foreseen ten thousand years ago; then suddenly I believed the world was breaking into two halves, that everything was turning a purer color, and that we human beings were not so wretched after all’”. Roberto Artl, The mad toy, 1926. This series of drawings (still in process) is a report from treks in the Sierra del Tepozteco in central Mexico. This long walks with my friend Omar Ramos started while the country was shutdown due to pandemic issues.”  

To define the series Call for family, De Coloblo uses a quote from Carl Jung: “I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love”. The geographical transit and the transit in the stages of life, leaves a reservoir of feelings and fears that intermingle in the perception and understanding of the present.

In other cases, such as the RSS series, he uses inks and develops compositions in black and white, in which he fills the entire surface, in a striking and dense vacuii horror. “The title is a play on words in reference to the term RSS (Really Simple Syndication) defining a family of feed formats used to publish frequently updated works on the Web… a multitude of information travelling into an interior silence bouncing on the walls of an empty house… But sometimes silence becomes noisy and shapes are vibrating, reproduced and transformed endlessly…”

In Chronosom he brings back sign elements from the pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico: “The significance of these “signs” engraved on rocks in the open air, which can also be found all around the world, heralds for some researchers the beginnings of a sacred or mythological script. The existence of writing before writing: a pictorial language developed in parallel and independently of oral language, consisting in a series of silent formulations associating figurative, symbolic and abstract forms”.

Arte Original presents a selection of these series, in which you can see the sensibility of an artist who has stripped itself of patterns to assume the vision of an anthropologist, in whose travels, he has found answers to personal concerns about the preservation of our habitat, coexistence, loneliness and cultural heritage.

Anny Bello