| Subject: Noted Mexican sculptor and painter Ernesto Mallard dies ... |
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He was 88.
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Date Posted: Friday, March 26, 12:41:32am
The sculptor and painter Ernesto Mallard dies ...
la Redacción Tiempo de lectura
March 25, 2021
Mexico City.
Ernesto Mallard, a sculptor and painter, died yesterday after a few weeks of fighting against death. Although he came to a time when he lacked sufficient strength, he insisted on standing up. Around two in the afternoon on Friday he could no longer do more. He died in his house, with his family, in peace, due to cardiorespiratory arrest.
Mallard, as he was known in the world of visual arts (in which he stood out since 1965, when he began to win important awards), studied Architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the first half of the fifties but, although he had an office at number 72 in Florencia, in the Juárez neighborhood, during the sixties, and participated in some very important projects —such as the remodeling and expansion of the Casino de la Selva hotel, a landmark in the history of Cuernavaca—, practically He did not pursue a degree, because his passion for sculpture and painting was much stronger, although at the same time it is evident that the type of painting and sculpture that he chose to develop would not have been possible without solid architectural knowledge.
Ernesto Mallard Arano, born in Cosamaloapan, Veracruz, on May 19, 1932, was a pioneer of kinetic art in our country, a form or current of art that aims to create works with movement, whether by optical or mechanical means.
Kineticism began to interest Mallard long before such a name existed. As he told James Oles in an interview conducted in 2014, on the occasion of the Connect the dots exhibition: “… since high school he already had an idea. They tried to teach us that the line was a succession of points. I thought then that no: for me the line is generated by a dynamic point, a point that moves in space. And a line that moves generates the plane and from the plane it goes to relief, from relief to volume. And the volume exists, logically, within the space ...
“I began to think about the great possibilities that the straight line had as such: the vertical line, the horizontal line and all their inclinations, not only in the plane but also in space. A simple line overlap has a great ability to provoke something visually. It's very emotional, at least for me. At that time he told me: 'If I see it and feel it, others should also be able to feel it and value it. And this from the energy that the movement of the spectator itself projects.
Perhaps the piece that can be considered as cardinal in the development of this search is the triptych Heliogony II, which Mallard built between 1967 and 1968 and exhibited at the Solar Exhibition, presented by the National Institute of Fine Arts from July to December 1968 at the ground floor galleries and the lobby of the Palacio de Bellas Artes.
Heliogony II obtained one of the acquisition awards that the INBA granted (since then the work has been part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art), and it was a kind of cornerstone that defined Mallard's creation throughout the following decade. Carlos Pellicer, whom Mallard met and frequented in the late 1960s, called this, and other similar works by Mallard, "Nature Things," a neologism with which he seeks to fuse the creativity of nature with human creativity.
The Nature Things, as the writer Alain-Paul Mallard - the youngest of Mallard's children - points out, house, under an acrylic dome, three-dimensional structures in structured metal and plastic thread governed by strict geometry. The intersection of axial and parallel lines generates a captivating illusion of movement through superposition of planes and a moiré effect - depending on the displacement of the angle of the gaze. These are works that involve the viewer at a perceptual level, requesting an active participation in the act of looking.
In the seventies, Mallard exhibited various series of Naturacosas in galleries that were then concentrated in the Zona Rosa, such as Pecanins, Misrachi or Chapultepec, but in the early eighties he decided not to exhibit in galleries again and began to work with the purpose of using other materials - stone, wire, steel, tinplate - and of departing from the commercial circuit. He made monumental sculptures that are found in various cities in Mexico and in 1992 he became a founding member of the International Symposium on Stainless Steel Sculpture, which to this day is held annually in the municipality of Tultepec, in the State of Mexico, already sometimes it is extended, as an exhibition, to Toluca.
Neither the biography nor the work of Mallard - which led him to present his work in countries as remote as Iraq - can be synthesized in this short note. Here the disappearance of a great artist is only reported by recalling some milestones in his extensive career.
Link ...
https://www.jornada.com.mx/notas/2021/03/20/cultura/fallece-el-escultor-y-pintor-ernesto-mallard/
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