Raúl Pineda brings light to the darkness of pain and tragedy that the country is going through

Bringing light from darkness is the work of artist Raúl Pineda, who with the gift of photographic memory and excessive persistence with the ancient technique of mezzotint engraving portrays the unhinged horror of violence in Mexico.

In one of her works, dismay is a gesture of the sonorous exclamation that takes hold of a face, eyes tightly closed, petals and stems around. The piece is called I cut these flowers for youand draws the moment of a searching mother, whom Raúl asked to recall when they knocked on the door of her house and handed her her son’s head in a box: “then that scream came out.”

Since childhood, in his native Cuernavaca, he saw these events of horror and tragedy all around him. As an adult, he has traveled to other places in the country, such as Guerrero, Michoacán or Zacatecas, to investigate the subject. “Many times they are just another number in the death toll. That is why I portray the crudeness, because in art not everything is beautiful. We are also moved by other things.”

The 29-year-old uses the ancient intaglio technique that emerged in the 18th century and is able to reproduce nuances and chiaroscuros. When he was studying for his degree, his teacher Pavel Mora showed him mezzotint or engraving in the dark way, which is “very time-consuming and complex,” Pineda explains in an interview.

“You have to grain a metal plate, it is a non-chemical chalcographic engraving. You grain in various directions until you reach a deep black; there, with a metal tip you start to scratch the light. The concept is to bring out the light: you are the focus to see the scene.”

The drawing is revealed once the engraving is printed, which must be done at an exact point. It requires meticulousness and patience, since a small plate takes a day of work to print; drawing and working on it, up to four months. At the Pasado Meridiano workshop in Morelos, “we have taken mezzotint to its purest state. The work of the master printers must be highlighted. It gives you these deep, velvety blacks, but also intense whites.”

One day, while he was playing football in the street, men on motorbikes came and killed a friend. After running, they returned to the body. From that moment he remembers the sound of breathing choked by blood.

“Those things motivated me to vindicate the victims of violence in Mexico,” he says. When Felipe Calderón was president and started the “war against narco”, Raúl was a child, but he began to notice what was happening around him and to question himself. “I decided to start drawing, to retain the image of the neighbor who disappeared, the friend who was killed. It was a silent war that became an everyday occurrence.”

He and his brother liked graffiti, but since he couldn’t do letters, he started a kind of visual diary, “to portray the faces around me. That’s where the polishing of this began, which became talking about the current situation in the country, for example, the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa, a banner of forced disappearance, the State and repression.”

Reaching out to groups of searchers is a constant in her career. “I wanted to bring these stories to museums and venues where art comes together and talk about the reality of what can happen to anyone.”

The exhibition is located in the Epifanía gallery (Londres 161, interior 50), in the bustling Zona Rosa. Cross-firewhich brings together the visions of violence of the artists Gustavo Monroy (1959), Guillermo Mollinedo (1979) and Raúl Pineda (1995).

“Are there still people who feel alienated when talking about violence and its effects? Are there people who can calmly say: in my close circle no one has been a victim of organized crime in its many forms?” is the question raised in this transgenerational exhibition, which will be open for a month.

“At Epifanía we conceive art as a means to reconstruct our history, broken by massacres and constant abuses against the humanity of others. We think it is possible to create an atmosphere of social restoration; to do so, it is necessary to weave and reconstruct the living memory that has been taken from us by governments that turn their backs on barbarism with a deafening silence.”

In the exhibition, among the colorful decapitated self-portraits by Monroy, oil paintings with pills and bagged heads by Mollinedo, there is a painting of a young man wearing a 43 shirt, one of Pineda’s pieces. In another, on the back wall, there is a large-format print that reveals a head served on a plate from the darkness. One could easily think that it is a work from centuries ago.

Pineda, the author, comments that he has always been influenced by the Baroque, especially by Caravaggio.

The faces of violence and of the missing and murdered emerge with light from the darkness, “in an image that is not sensationalist. Art can be grotesque and beautiful at the same time; it is the ambivalence between the divine and the grotesque. Much of my work is about making people feel.”