Quintaesencia callejera [Street Quintessence] Painting

Acrylic on found cardboard 17.5 x 32 x 3.5 in., framed (artwork measures approximately 7.5 x 22.5) The work is framed, in mat-float, with a cloth-covered mat over a black backing, on which the painting supports are floated. It is framed behind glass in a box-style ash frame, appropriately wired and ready to hang. Because the piece has some three-dimensionality, the frame has enough space behind the glass to keep it sufficiently elevated from the “upright” edges of the found cardboard support elements, which are placed adjacent to one another with their adjoining border edges protruding vertically from the horizontal painted surface. The acrylic painting is realized on a support of found cardboard. It is technically a poliptych, though all five elements are fixed together permanently on the matboard backing used for the float. "Quintaesencia callejera" is one of several pieces made in parallel with –but not directly as a part of– a series titled “De visión y desecho” [Of Vision and Detritus]. In some ways, the notion of framing itself is a basic element in the conception of this work and others in the abovementioned series or parallel to it. These works share the common element of having been painted on “found cardboard” supports, specifically on the rectangular bottom panels of commercially made cardboard cartons that were used as “empaques” [packages or containers] for chewing gum, each container holding approximately a couple dozen smaller packets. It is common in Mexican urban centers to see impoverished, principally indigenous children and women selling chewing gum or candy out of such containers to pedestrians, people on buses, motorists stopped at traffic lights, and those sitting in parks, cafés or restaurants. The containers are usually discarded haphazardly on the streets when they are emptied of their useful (salable) contents, and are left flattened, torn, and abandoned on the city’s streets and sidewalks. I collect them as I find them during my peripatetic wanderings, and have used them as supports for paintings that deal with the precarious economic and social situation of the people who once had them in their hands, people who themselves have essentially been left flattened, torn, and abandoned by the socioeconomic reality in which they continuously struggle for mere survival. Many of the images I paint on these supports are specifically related to the supports themselves, to the marginalized people who “provide” them, and to the street-centered activities they engage in to keep body and soul together. I leave the commercial and promotional logos (the product of industrial offset lithography), found on the flattened sides of the cartons, just as they are, as a kind of integral “frame” to the painted imagery and a reference to the original source and "extra-artistic" function of the supports. The painted imagery sometimes rhymes on multiple levels with these markings. The scene depicted here is the image of one such young “chiclero” [chewing gum vendor], trying to flag down a bus in a desolate part of the city filled with abandoned industrial warehouses. He hopes the bus driver will be kind-hearted enough to stop and pick him up, even though he cannot pay the fare, so that he might try to ply his trade among the passengers. If they buy from him, it is usually out of compassion, too, rather than any urgent need or desire for chewing gum. Across the street, four figures confront the viewer’s gaze. They are leaders of business, politics and the forces of state-controlled violence, shown in an attitude of conspiratorial whispering and supervision of surrounding reality, which includes the situation of the young chewing gum vendor, of course, but is also meant to include our own, as observers who return their gaze. This piece derives its title from its seeking to express something about the "quintessential" nature of class or caste divisions (with some on one side –of the street, of fortune– and some on the other) as a determining factor in our shared reality, and from the five-part structure of the poliptych support as well as the number of figurative elements represented.

Multi-paneled Painting:Acrylic on Cardboard

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:32 W x 17.5 H x 3.5 D in

Number of Panels:2

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.