Fernando Reyes

When the works of the children of the Open Air Schools were shown in Paris, more than one critic could make reference to the parallelism to the avant-garde artists. Undoubtedly the observer of the painting by the boy Fernando Reyes will be reminded of the primitivist exoticisms of Paul Gauguin. If one judges by other works of the young artist, it is possible that the "cultural" references in this composition were provided by his mentor, Francisco Díaz de León, who at the age of 16 instructed him at the school in Tlalpan, a nearby area to Mexico City. Reyes came from a poor family of adobe brick makers, and was not familiar with anything that could have been happening in Europe, but not so his teacher, who in his works shows evidence of this knowledge in his palettes and Post-Impressionism subjects. Although it is true that the artists directing the schools and painting centers did try to stimulate the child creativity freely, it is also that they sought to achieve an aesthetic production which would, based on its own value, at the same time try to be modern.