Ollin

Vicente Rojo

MexicoBajoLaLluvia
MexicoBajoLaLluvia
Negaciones
Negaciones
PiramidesYVolcanes
PiramidesYVolcanes
Senales
Senales

Vicente Rojo (1932, Barcelona; 2021, Mexico City) was a painter, sculptor, and graphic designer, and one of the artists who gave Mexican art its abstract turn. His father, an engineer on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, fled to France and then to Mexico, and Vicente followed in 1949, at seventeen and without a passport. He learned typography and design under Miguel Prieto, another exile, at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, and for the rest of his life he kept two practices going at once. As a designer he ran the art of Ediciones Era, the publishing house he co-founded in 1960, designed some seven hundred of its covers, drew the first-edition cover of Cien años de soledad (1967), and laid out the magazines Artes de México, Plural, and the newspaper La Jornada. As a painter he was part of the Generación de la Ruptura, the generation that broke with muralism, and worked in geometric abstraction for sixty years. Mexico gave him its National Prize for Arts and Sciences in 1991, and he joined El Colegio Nacional in 1994.

He painted in series, each one a single structure turned over and over. The letter T entered his work in 1964 and became the whole of it. Señales (1966-1972) set the T among signs and signals on rough grounds. Negaciones (1971-1974) put it alone on a strictly square canvas, painted not as a letter but as the shadow a T-shaped block would cast, stepped in a few flat tones with a forty-five degree cut wherever a side ends, the face of the block left the color of the ground. Rojo named the series for what he wanted: paintings that would deny each other, and deny him as their author. He thought of showing them as the work of forty invented painters. What stayed with him was the method, "starting from a very rigid structure, within a strictly square form, which paradoxically allowed me to work with great freedom."

The other series here took him thirty years. In 1953 he watched two rains fall at once over the valley of Cholula, from the observatory at Tonantzintla, and could not paint it. "It always seemed to me an impossible subject to paint, and that is what drew me to it." México bajo la lluvia (1981-1989) is the answer: a square canvas, a diagonal across it so the two triangles lean the way the rain had leaned, and over the whole surface closely spaced diagonal lines, made of dots, triangles, half-disks, steps, and blotches, in a cool palette with warm notes, no part of the canvas left empty. He painted well over a hundred of them.

Escenarios (1989-2006) turned to the landscape, of Mexico and of his childhood: pyramids, stelae, the Paseo de San Juan in Barcelona, and more and more the volcano. Sergio Pitol, writing on the first of them, found the series' tension "between the rigid structure of the pyramid and the fleeting fluidity of the volcanoes," and wrote that Rojo "organizes an order only to knock it down later and raise it again." The volcanoes grew into a series of their own, Volcanes construidos, in paintings, prints, and bronzes. In the four prints of Prosa del Popocatépetl (2003) a stepped pyramid, every course of it written over with small signs, is overrun by streams of lava, melts, and ends as a soft mountain.

He belongs in this set because his series are what a sketch does: one structure, fixed, and every canvas a different reading of it. A T that is only its shadow, rain that is only a grid of small marks, a sign cut from three shapes, and a pyramid laid only to be taken down are rules a program can carry out.

Learn more:

Recreations here

  • Negaciones: a wall of square panels, each one the letter T painted only as the shadow it casts. A T-shaped block stands off the canvas, light comes from one corner, and the sides of the block are painted in stepped tones while its face stays the color of the ground. Every few seconds one panel is painted over with a negation that matches no other on the wall: a different way up, a different corner for the light, different sides left out, different tones. across is the panels on a side, stripes the tones a shadow steps through, depth how far the block stands off the canvas, pace the seconds between paintings, and variation the whole wall. A press paints the next panel now. An original Ollin interpretation written from the paintings and from what Rojo said about them.
  swift run Example-Recreations-VicenteRojo-Negaciones

The wall back as flat polygons, with the letter in the file in the ground's own color:

  swift run Example-Recreations-VicenteRojo-Negaciones --export-svg wall.svg --frame 120
  • MexicoBajoLaLluvia: a square covered by a grid, every cell painted and one small mark set on it, with the rain falling. Above the diagonal from the top left corner the marks are the rain, half-disks and dots. Below it they are the ground, triangles and steps. Blotches land on both. The colors run in broken streaks along the diagonal and slide down it at drift cells a second. cells is the grid across the square, wind how ragged the streaks are, and variation the whole canvas. An original Ollin interpretation written from the paintings.
  swift run Example-Recreations-VicenteRojo-MexicoBajoLaLluvia

One ground square and one mark for every cell, as vectors:

  swift run Example-Recreations-VicenteRojo-MexicoBajoLaLluvia --export-svg rain.svg --frame 300
  • Senales: one sign after another, each painted over the last. A sign stands on the canvas's middle line, mirrored left to right, and is built down that line from a crown (a triangle, an arch, a disk, or a triangle with its top cut off), a bar (plain, a band with a row of dots, or the crossbar of a T), a body (a shield, a square turned on its corner, a cut triangle turned point down, or a door), and sometimes a foot. Every piece is cut from the circle, the triangle, or the square. Some are laid flat and some are worked, clouded and scumbled and scratched and dripped, and a piece nested inside another takes the other finish. The hand's marks are the one thing on the canvas that is not mirrored. pace is the seconds between signs, work how heavily the worked pieces are scraped, and variation the whole series. A press starts the next sign. An original Ollin interpretation written from the paintings.
  swift run Example-Recreations-VicenteRojo-Senales

The sign as its cut shapes, with every worked piece's marks in a clip group of its own outline:

  swift run Example-Recreations-VicenteRojo-Senales --export-svg sign.svg --frame 540
  • PiramidesYVolcanes: the four states of Prosa del Popocatépetl played in order and started again. A stepped pyramid is laid course by course from the ground, each course written with rows of small signs. Then streams of lava break out of the steps, the first from the crater, each one a band outlined once, twice, or three times with round ends; a stream may rise and turn over once, and after that it only falls. Then the steps lose their edges and swell into lobes while the streams fill in, and the pyramid is taken down from the top. courses is the pyramid's height in steps, streams how many break out, melt how far the steps melt, seconds one whole cycle, and every cycle deals a new print. An original Ollin interpretation written from the prints and from Pitol's essay.
  swift run Example-Recreations-VicenteRojo-PiramidesYVolcanes

The pyramid with every stream running, as courses, signs, and closed outlines:

  swift run Example-Recreations-VicenteRojo-PiramidesYVolcanes --export-svg prosa.svg --frame 965

This is a homage after Vicente Rojo, made for learning. It isn't a reproduction of a specific work, and it isn't affiliated with or endorsed by the artist or his estate.

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