While eschewing all formal pictorial considerations as mere “tastefulness,” this group of Mexican humanists makes the most of limited visual manifestos. Their victims are vignetted, perhaps relating to an indigenous pre-Conquest inheritance; specific grotesques are rendered in full sculptural plasticity of form, but exist in timeless, vague vacuums of non-environmental open wash. The drawings generally possess the quality of studies, due to this care lavished on volumetric creatures in generalized isolation. In placing compositional concerns after the diffused message of humanism, in one bolt of rapid anguish, they would appeal to mass conscience, ethics and morality before individual sensibility. And as in the cases of Arevalo, Gonzales, and Medina’s skillfully drawn figures there is yet the impression of assessing an unrealized fragment.
However Degadillo’s robed titans, upward struggling prisoners, and (as interpreted only upon a slow second reading) his corpses on a flat car are extremely effective, as are the stunted beings of Sepulveda. Where Medina’s exposures of the debilitated have given up altogether, Sepulveda has invented a band of monsters, in a classic graphic style somewhere between a soft Cuevas and an Arnold Roth, who are as engagingly cunning and sharp-eyed as they are deformed.
Leonel Gongora in his “Marquise de Sade” series is more direct, if less within the official program, and the better for it. Developing a cast of gnome-like characters in a comic strip of illustrations, he makes his statement with keen humor as if taking us into his confidence, enjoining with pointed but non-assailing satire.
—Fidel A. Danieli
