LUIS PABLO BEAUREGARD
I have always believed that one of the marvels of art is the creative process the artist has gone through to convey what is right before our eyes. I don’t mean only the technical work that makes up a work of art but what begins with mere observation. For ex- ample, Auguste Rodin had a detailed ritual. The sculptor started with a sketch that then became a clay model. The Frenchman had learned to observe the finished piece inside the marble even be- fore one of his assistants first drove the chisel into the stone to reveal it. Thus, in the late 19th century, Rodin refined a method that helped him to translate the proportions of his plaster models to scale.
FERNANDO GÁLVEZ DE AGUINAGA
The relationship between man and stone is so intense, that the first phase of humanity which started approximately 2.8 million years ago and lasted until the appearance of metal, is called the Stone Age. Many scientists theorize that the fabrication of stone tools was what led us to evolve towards our human condition, and this construction of stony tools seems to have even gifted us with the spark to discover the first ways to make and control fire.
MERRY MAC MASTERS
Lawyer by formation, who has lived art - his passion - since childhood, Alan Jorge de Rosenzweig (Mexico City, 1963), whose artistic name is Peñalta, spent many years of his life without exhibitions, walkways or reflectors, submerged in a search without anxieties or hurrys. One day, however, sitting in the public bathroom of a shopping center in Cancun, he realized that a face was trapped in the ceiling. Then, he took out a piece of graphite that always accompanies him, to release it. He jointed some lines in the stone with other lines, in a process of reconstruction of the construction, so that this face appeared. It was his first encounter with a technique that consists of painting on a stone, whether it´s marble, onyx or quartzite; that is, intervene and populate it with faces, whether human or animal, which he helps to escape from its environment, says Peñalta, who exhibits "Piedra adentro" (stone inside), a sample of 26 pieces, at the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Prehispanic Art in Mexico, in Oaxaca.
JOSUÉ RAMíREZ
To discover in the veins of marble, quartzite, onyx, the dampness, the clouds, among the foliage a face, a figure, leads to sensing a gaze that upon seeing us prompts another look, a return to being, an approach of a presence, making present a predestined absence, sensed, animated by the line that reveals its continuity, its gesture, its sensitive soft image over...
ADRIANA CANTORAL
While Peñalta's work evokes the configuration of the petrified unconscious of the first artists of the Paleolithic era. Likewise, his work can be understood as an anthropo-zoomorphic archaeology in the wrinkled skin of rocks. Furthermore, his creations possess multiple readings and theoretical approaches. One of them is the analogy between Plato's myth of the cave and his marble art. On the one hand, the Greek philosopher sought to symbolically illustrate authentic knowledge, that is, ideas through the natural light of reason.
ROSA MARÍA SÁNCHEZ LARA
We often draw in our imagination the strokes we see on the moon, chisel in memory the volumes of the clouds. Without much thought, we see faces in the veins of marble or onyx. Although they are different for everyone, there they are, in the depths, in their geological formations. They are nature's fortuitous designs. In psychological terms, this is called pareidolia.