Baja Paintings

758 Humboldt Street (beside the Marriott Hotel)
November 5 – 26, 2011

Opening Reception
Saturday, November 5, 2011, 2 – 4 p.m.
3:00 p.m.   A performance by Palomitas de Maiz
dance, percussion, mandolin

Luis Merino was born in Mexico City.  When he was eight his father took him to Veracruz where Luis fell in love with the sea. During his youth he made many subsequent visits to sea-side towns including La Paz to which he first went at age 18.  Luis has since often visited the Sea-of-Cortez area.  His work for this exhibition was painted in La Paz from March to June of this year.
 
Luis’s father and two uncles were much interested in art, and from them he absorbed the idea of art as a way of life.  From an early age he knew that he already was or would be an artist.  In 1958-60 and 1962-64 he attended the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City.  On campus and on visits to many of the city’s museums and churches he became conversant with numerous styles including Mexican, American and European modernism.  The exhibition ‘One Hundred Years of French Painting,’ with its Picassos, Braques and Modiglianis, was one of the highlights.  In late-1968 to mid-1970 he attended the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende.   One of his teachers was the American abstract painter James Pinto.  At Pinto’s invitation, Luis taught life-drawing during his final semester.  In the autumn of 1970 Luis and his wife Sandra moved to Canada.
 
In the 1970s Luis began to reveal a commitment to cubism.  It could, he was aware, open up the imagination and lead to new ground.  From the 1980s, he has deployed that style to portray the female form in expressions of sensuality, harmony, complexity and inner mystery.  The emphasis on peaceable content was, for him, resonant with the work, for example, of post-revolution Mexican muralists Pedro Coronel and Rufino Tamayo.  Significant also for Luis was the humanism which had underlain much existential discourse in the 1960s.  This influence is present in the figurative art of Tamayo, Cuevas, Rico Lebrum and others.
 
La Paz (‘the peace’), capital city of Baja, offers traditional Mexican life, period architecture, marvellous markets, clear sky and calm sea.  For the current exhibition, Luis Merino has distilled these attributes into free-flowing cubistic formats.