José Agustín Arrieta

Regarding one of the most shocking paintings by José Agustín Arrieta, José Luis Bello and Gustavo Ariza assert for its content and social analysis that “the gleeful and mischievous lives of the underworld was one of the themes that most interested Arrieta’s descriptive brush. Nothing is hidden nor dissimulated in this scene of truancy. The pub’s sordidness, which can be inferred by the lack of glasses and the table’s rough quality; the protagonists’ neglect...” It must be noted that the cloth allows for other interpretations: a sort of reduced political meeting by reviewing propaganda or bulletins, where joking around is the central theme. Arrieta used to repeat compositional objects and to reiterate his characters’ faces and clothing. In this piece, on the upper right side, two characters from Velasquez’s Los borrachos make an appearance. The artist distances himself somewhat from the regionalist typification in order to create a more generalized group, though always Mexican, which associates him to the Flemish artists’ universe.