Juan Soriano

Regional Mexican painting of the XIX century, marginal up to a certain point in the academic tradition was highly appreciated in the area of  aesthetic ideas of the post-revolutionary artistic panorama. It was, in part, a re-encounter with artistic roots of Mexico, but also a nationalistic stand of overvaluing the "folk" as the only source of the Mexican art. As a model, the nineteen century painting influenced a wide variety of painters, like María Izquierdo, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Roberto Montenegro and in his child portraits, the paintings of José María Estrada inspired Juan Soriano. Often not remembered, is the fact that Soriano stands out in the beginning as a high flying figurative painter, which even earned him the recognition of Diego Rivera. In the decade of the forties and the end of the thirties, Soriano painted a number of portraits of society and especially children in positions that go from the ludicrous to the perverse. His compositions are not exempt of cryptic readings, if not ambiguous metaphors, which structure a complex network of associations between forms and meanings. Such is the spirit that animates <i>Niñas jugando</i> of the Blaisten Collection.