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Txutxo
born and raised in Mexico City grew up surrounded by his father’s
work restoring Asian as well as other cultural artifacts. Upon graduating
in 1984 with a degree in Fine Arts from the Escuela Nacional de Artes
Plasticas (ENAP) at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM)
spent 5 years in the Mexico City punk rock scene. He began his career
as a visual artist in the early 90’s. In the mid 90’s Txutxo exhibited
and traveled in Austria, Spain, and France as well the entire West
Coast from Tijuana Mexico to Vancouver Canada. Txutxo settled in San
Francisco in the late 90’s because of its numerous and diverse cultural
communities which has become the prime inspiration for his current
work. Txutxo intentionally engages the spectator with a visual vocabulary
that is multidimensional in culture and vision. His prints are
very much like Chinese puzzle boxes in that they open only after proper
mental processing one element then another. The first element
embedded in his prints is an indigenous Mexican cultural upbringing
with Aztec ancestry where social lines such as love and evil are not
so Euro-black and white. The next element stems from an early exposure
to Asian artifacts in his childhood, which expands his refined iconic
vocabulary of Mexican and American traditional and pop art. The third
element is that of the engaged cultural observer reading and transforming
scenes of blended cultural themes of common life into social commentaries
with clear strokes of sarcasm, eroticism, struggle, judgement, drama
and passion to form visionary prints. His printing technique is unique
in that he starts with rendering his scenes onto a linoleum block
followed by a print composite of bristol paper, affixed gold leaf
and silk-screened inks. |
