Mexican muralist Rafael Cauduro died on Saturday at the age of 72. The visual artist was ill and kept away from the public. Cauduro was the author of such masterpieces as A Cry for Justice. Seven Major Crimes, a mural that takes up three stories of the nation’s Supreme Court building that depicts a raped woman, men being thrown into the void, protesters pierced with spears, or the files of cases piling up with no-one-high . Unclassifiable and an outsider, as critics have described him, Cauduro said that in his work he tries “to make an understandable lie”: “Whenever my work is talked about, words like reality or, worse, hyper-reality come up. Superior to reality or essentially real? For the artist, perversion was more than realism in his work: “Pervers means etymologically ‘great return’, ‘great destruction’, ‘great change’ or ‘great conversion’.
“It is with great sadness that we inform you that the great Mexican visual artist and muralist Rafael Cauduro passed away today. We appreciate the condolences and displays of affection towards the family and their daughters Elena and Juliana,” read the short message published on the painter’s official accounts this Saturday. Culture Minister Alejandra Frausto lamented the death of “one of the best plastic artists, one of the most important in the world” on Twitter. “He leaves us his work and his critical eye,” he said. So does Arturo Zaldívar, President of the Supreme Court of the Nation (SCJN): “I am deeply sorry for the death of the great Rafael Cauduro. A great loss for the art of Mexico. His mural at the SCJN will be a constant cry against injustice. They sent their condolences to dozens of institutions and representatives of the cultural sector.
Another work by the painter Cauduro in the exhibition “A Cauduro is a Cauduro (is a Cauduro)”, at the Colegio San Ildefonso, Claudia Aréchiga (EL PAÍS)
Cauduro never had formal artistic training. He was studying industrial design when he decided to drop out of university to become a painter. Scholars who study his life and work believe that this was the reason for his solo art, that he was a painter working outside the pictorial currents of his time. The artist dabbled in abstractionism and geometry in his early years. Experimentation led him to leave two-dimensionality and play with perspective to create impossible spaces with ghostly characters, monstrous beings or angels. Even if Cauduro’s work does not have a linear progression for the professional world, there are constants, such as the use of the materials: the artist bought the necessary materials at a hardware store.
That year Trilce Verlag published a book that brings together more than 400 unpublished works, sketches and notes that allow us to understand how the painter created. He also organized an exhibition that was shown at the Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City. The critic Juan Rafael Coronel, in the book titled Here ‘was’ Cauduro, points out that the artist’s remarks “border on rarity”: “Strange is what tells us a story that comes from the outside; maybe that’s why his contemporaries saw him differently.” The mistake in the title of the published book – the b instead of the v – refers to spelling mistakes that Cauduro deliberately introduced into some of his works. The book’s editor, Deborah Holz, also described him as an “outsider” in an interview with that newspaper in May. Holz mourned the painter’s death in a tweet this Saturday: “For six years we have been working on the edition of a book that has made his impressive work known. It was a privilege to have known him and enjoyed his intelligence and sense of humor.”
“Rafael Cauduro is a significant example of some of the grave injustices committed by the history of national art,” said academic Dina Comisarenco at the book launch. The researcher, who wrote an essay for the publication, attributed this to “prejudices” stemming from the artist’s early success, which attracted the attention of the market and international galleries as early as the 1980s; by the institution that commissioned the mural – the Supreme Court – and by the realistic style of the work, which nonetheless questions and deceives. When Cauduro presented his project to produce this mural to the Supreme Court, he was chosen despite the critical nature of the proposal. So he began his masterpiece, showing “the limitations, the failures and the unresolved problems” of the judiciary. Gonzalo Vélez, who also wrote an essay in Here was Cauduro, told EL PAÍS that in those years muralism “fell” and became a “pamphleteering movement”. What Cauduro did was “a kind of renewal”.
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