Amador Lugo

In Amador Lugo’s Sand Mines, a flower-filled meadow in the foreground drops off sharply to reveal the ravaged and contorted earth; the artist emphasizes the variety of textures and earth tones recently exposed to the elements. Gravel pits and sand mines are common across central Mexico, but the picture was apparently painted in Santa Fe, an outlying area to the west of Mexico City that is now the site of major urban development. A tiny road leading off to the left provides scant evidence of man’s presence, except for the destruction wrought by the (absent) trucks and work crews. Barely visible is the figure of fellow painter Luis Nishizawa carrying his easel, intent on capturing the same scene from a different angle. Amador Lugo’s early landscapes of around 1940, painted not long after his participation in the Open Air School in Taxco, consist of snake-like trees and squat houses, rendered as if formed from clay. Clearly demonstrating how far he had progressed, his later work abandons this childlike simplicity rather than embracing it as a modernist device, as did Rufino Tamayo and María Izquierdo, for example. Instead, he looks back to the vast panoramas painted by José María Velasco in the late 19th century. Like Velasco, Lugo depicts his subject with attention to botanical, geological, and atmospheric details that result in an almost photographic realism, though this semi-industrial site is much more prosaic than Velasco’s nationalist spectacles. In the 1950s, along with Pablo O’Higgins and Carlos Orozco Romero, Lugo’s relatively conservative landscapes reached a wide public through the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana (founded in 1949) and he found success in the expanding commercial art market of the postwar period.