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Lot Essay
The beginnings of Toledo’s fantastic zoology date to his adolescent years, redolent with memories of roaming the land and encounters with the storied animals—monkeys and goats, grasshoppers and crocodiles—held sacred within Oaxacan tradition. Toledo studied lithography at the Taller Libre de Grabado in Mexico City in the late 1950s before moving in 1960 to Paris, where he met Octavio Paz and Rufino Tamayo; he returned to Juchitán, his birthplace, in 1965. Associated with the postwar Ruptura generation, which broke with the political mission of Mexican muralism in favor of experimental and sometimes abstract expressionism, his work is contemporary with such artists as Pedro Coronel, Alberto Gironella, and Rodolfo Nieto. Like Tamayo and Rodolfo Morales deeply invested in the cultural patrimony of the Isthmus and Pacific coast, Toledo based himself in Oaxaca, his work and identity richly imbricated within its historical landscape and ecology. Fondly known as El Maestro, he lent sizable support to local institutions, notably the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, as well as to libraries and the cultural and environmental conservancy Pro-OAX.
Toledo drew amply from Zapotec and indigenous lore, populating his images with sagacious and otherworldly animals in myriad states of animation and metamorphosis. Camouflaged within a rich, prismatic ground, the errant subject of El chivo equivocado peers out sheepishly toward the viewer, his expression chagrined as he sits awkwardly on his haunches. The painting’s luminous, intricately tessellated ground appears in numerous works from the 1970s, among them El cangrejo y la garza (1974), El perro ladra (1974), and Onagre (1976); here, in mineral tones of sienna, ocher, and umber, the pattern suggests the crystalline textures of sand or of a spider’s web. “What interests him is the immense zoological garden,” remarked the writer Carlos Monsiváis, and the animals “that manipulate instinct in their own interest” and appear “on the verge of concupiscence or of being transformed into a landscape of melancholy portrayed in daybreaks or dusks melted down into images” (“Off with Toledo’s head, said the gut-slashed iguana,” Francisco Toledo, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2000, p. 83).
“Toledo is sure of his intentions, of his liking for the never-ending story of the genesis,” Monsiváis reflected, “the stroke of that beautiful and merciless moment from where history and fiction sprang, when nobody distinguished between what was sacred and what was sacrilege.” Among the “false and anomalous proverbs found by chance in Toledo’s work,” he passed along the following:
Forms are pieces of glass in the billy-goats’ pen
The story about colours is always different to the story about images
All forms are sexual. All symbols are chaste.
Geometry is the trap where the straight lines die
In its multiplying, arabesque lines and charmingly miscreant subject, El chivo equivocado embodies the ecstatic joie de vivre that courses through all of Toledo’s painting, assimilating color and shape, body and surface into a kaleidoscopic celebration of life itself. “Thus it was at the beginning of time and thus it will be at the end of time, in the mortal embrace of desire and metamorphosis,” Monsiváis concluded of Toledo’s animistic worldview. “In his work, as in William Blake’s aphorism, the lust of the goat is the bounty of God” (op. cit., pp. 84-8).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Toledo drew amply from Zapotec and indigenous lore, populating his images with sagacious and otherworldly animals in myriad states of animation and metamorphosis. Camouflaged within a rich, prismatic ground, the errant subject of El chivo equivocado peers out sheepishly toward the viewer, his expression chagrined as he sits awkwardly on his haunches. The painting’s luminous, intricately tessellated ground appears in numerous works from the 1970s, among them El cangrejo y la garza (1974), El perro ladra (1974), and Onagre (1976); here, in mineral tones of sienna, ocher, and umber, the pattern suggests the crystalline textures of sand or of a spider’s web. “What interests him is the immense zoological garden,” remarked the writer Carlos Monsiváis, and the animals “that manipulate instinct in their own interest” and appear “on the verge of concupiscence or of being transformed into a landscape of melancholy portrayed in daybreaks or dusks melted down into images” (“Off with Toledo’s head, said the gut-slashed iguana,” Francisco Toledo, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2000, p. 83).
“Toledo is sure of his intentions, of his liking for the never-ending story of the genesis,” Monsiváis reflected, “the stroke of that beautiful and merciless moment from where history and fiction sprang, when nobody distinguished between what was sacred and what was sacrilege.” Among the “false and anomalous proverbs found by chance in Toledo’s work,” he passed along the following:
Forms are pieces of glass in the billy-goats’ pen
The story about colours is always different to the story about images
All forms are sexual. All symbols are chaste.
Geometry is the trap where the straight lines die
In its multiplying, arabesque lines and charmingly miscreant subject, El chivo equivocado embodies the ecstatic joie de vivre that courses through all of Toledo’s painting, assimilating color and shape, body and surface into a kaleidoscopic celebration of life itself. “Thus it was at the beginning of time and thus it will be at the end of time, in the mortal embrace of desire and metamorphosis,” Monsiváis concluded of Toledo’s animistic worldview. “In his work, as in William Blake’s aphorism, the lust of the goat is the bounty of God” (op. cit., pp. 84-8).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park