Toledo's Metamorphoses - works of Francisco Toledo - Critical Essay

Art in America, Feb, 2001 by Christian Viveros-Faune

After years of absence from the international art circuit, the work of Francisco Toledo was seen recently in Europe in a long-awaited, highly successful exhibition that debuted at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery and traveled to Madrid's Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. The British press hailed Toledo as "the greatest living Mexican artist." For Toledo, the attention must have come as something of a mixed blessing. It had been more than two decades since his last major exhibition, at Mexico City's Museo de Arte Moderno. An elusive, publicity-shy artist who has repeatedly made efforts to remove himself from the glare of publicity, Toledo has declined to mount retrospective exhibitions of his work for years. The Reina Sofia as well as other museums tried repeatedly but were rebuffed. On the eve of the show's opening, Whitechapel director Catherine Lampert told a reporter from Madrid's El Pais that "up to now the general public has had little on which to base their appreciation of his work, save for reproductions and the handful of his works in museums around the world."

Toledo's deliberate courting of anonymity has not prevented him from acquiring a dedicated following. His collectors know full well they are dealing with a special character. Toledo donates a large portion of his substantial sales--the artist commands as much as $500,000 for a single work--to his community through a voluntary brand of village taxation called el tequio, thereby repaying a moral debt to Oaxaca, his beloved hometown.

In the last decade, Toledo has been instrumental in turning time-worn, colonial Oaxaca into a dynamic center for the visual arts and literature. A partial inventory of his village philanthropy reads like the 20-year plan of a particularly ambitious, First World, cultural development corporation. There's the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca, the Graphic Arts Institute of Oaxaca (which holds some 100,000 books on art and architecture), the Jorge Luis Borges Library for the Blind (which Toledo created, he says, after watching a group of blind folks visit a nearby art museum), the Centro Fotografico Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Ediciones Toledo (a printing house, which most recently published translations of the poets John Ashbery and Seamus Heaney), the Centro Cultural Santo Domingo (botanical garden, art restoration center and library) and Pro-OAX (a local environmental and cultural preservation group)--all of which were founded or cofounded and are financially supported by the artist.

But, just as importantly, Toledo has led efforts to scotch plans to modernize Oaxaca's city center. Using his considerable influence to forestall the construction of luxury hotels, four-lane road expansions and asphalt parking lots, Toledo has turned his own private esthetic activism into a groundswell of popular civic awareness. Oaxaca, once a sleepy Latin backwater, has been transformed--largely through the efforts of a single contemporary artist--into one of Mexico's major cultural, artistic and political hubs.

Few artists have ever made more of their ethnic and cultural origins than Toledo. He has crafted a style that is solidly connected to international contemporary art as well as European modernism, yet is intimately tied to Zapotec Indian political and cultural traditions dating back two millennia that are his birthright. Nominally a painter, Toledo produces canvases so thickly encrusted with stuff as to seem three-dimensional; he also makes stand-alone sculptures in wood, clay and a variety of other materials, and a wealth of drawings, prints and photographs.

Vividly graphic, suffused with violence, irony and a particularly randy brand of eroticism, Toledo's work is a seamless meshing of global and local cultures and high art. Dream images from his childhood are fused with pre-Columbian symbolism and myriad references to the work of Dubuffet, Miro, Tapies, Klee, Tamayo, Blake, Goya, Ensor and Durer, among other artists, and also to the writing of figures like Kafka and Borges. Snakes and turtles abound, as do rabbits and coyotes, bats and toads, crickets and dogs, as well as human figures from Mexican history, cycling from one work to another in a dizzying bestiary that is part ancient codex, part intensely modern graffiti. Toledo's work is based in part on the largely misunderstood, shamanistic notion of the nagual, the belief that each human's fate is intertwined with that of an Aztec spirit in animal form.

"Subjects emerge from one another," the Mexican poet Veronica Volkow has written about Toledo's art. "A deer from a lion, an iguana from a woman, a cricket from the mouth of a toad. A chain joins all beings in the meshing of the gears and their devourings, their copulations, their mirrors, their metamorphoses. The entire universe seems to be joined unto itself, emerging from and terminating in a circle that may begin from any mouth, any sex, any eye, any orifice, any touching."(1)

Born to a shopkeeper's family in Juchitan Province on the Pacific coast, Toledo began studying painting at the age of 12. In Oaxaca, the local library offered him access to illustrated books containing the works of Goya, Hogarth and Picasso. After entering the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1957, Toledo was awarded his first exhibitions, in Mexico City and Fort Worth. With the money he made from these shows, he lit out for Paris in 1960, at the age of 19. Armed with a letter of introduction from Mexico City gallery director Antonio Souza, he met Rufino Tamayo, with whom he is most often stylistically linked. This meeting initiated an important friendship that would last until the older artist's death.