Here the Mexican artist from Oaxaca, Manuel DeCisneros, gives human shape to his subjects using the pages of a printed newspaper. This work is from 2008. His inspiration? Those peach colored pages of The Financial Times.
I asked DeCisneros how he came to use newspaper pages as part of his creations.
He tells me that it was 2007 and he gets sponsored to study art in Barcelona, Spain. So he travels from his native Mexico and finds his new surroundings “too cold, with no foliage on the trees, it was winter, I felt lonely, nobody around whom I knew to talk to, so I was emotionally affected. I saw my mission there as that of attending the Massana School where I was enrolled in a course titled, Creating Paintings, all devoted to abstract art. I am a figurative artist, a purist is how I consider myself.
“My finances were limited and buying art supplies in Europe is expensive, so I would opt for taking long walks into the City, about 50 minutes on foot, but in the process I would observe everything I would see, as when I ate at restaurants, and one day I got to see a copy of the Financial Times, and the peach color of the paper on which it was printed fascinated me, so I decided to paint over it, and , of course, it was the perfect medium for my economic situation and I used the newspapers, as to me those financial pages represented wealth, and then compared to my own situation, my nostalgic feelings, and by the time I started painting with newspapers, my sketches were changing. My art was turning more grotesque , I wanted to sort of laugh at man and the acts that he commits. On top of all that my room was in a basement, dark and cold, terrible conditions on which to paint…..”
TheMarioBlog post #3010