Carmen Parra, “a total rebel” of art

On the threshold of her 80th birthday, which she will celebrate on November 12, as well as 60 years of career, the painter and sculptor Carmen Parra defines herself as a furious madwoman who has been fortunate enough to make a living from his work.

Although miraculously, because I have remained without a gallery; only many years ago I was in Arvil and Lourdes Chumacero. Galleries are prisons.he says.

Affable and very lively in her dealings, the anthropologist, set designer and musician (with studies in piano and flute), a little-known aspect, says that thanks to Damien Hirst, the most sought-after artist of our time in the world, she was able to immerse herself in England of that delirium of contemporary artwhich has nothing to do with Mexican or Latin American reality.

The European ones, he says, “are self-satisfied societies with a lot of money. The last time I checked, Damien’s capital was £300m, so it was very interesting that he showed me a world that was completely unknown to me, that of contemporary art galleries, which are now basically banks, a madness of money and perhaps money laundering.”

“I prefer to eat chiles en nogada than to live in that trembling delirium of success and money. Success is deadly, it robs you of life. As Octavio Paz said: “Mexicans always arrive behind at the door of history, because now everyone wants to be the Damien Hirst of artists in Mexico; they don’t understand that he comes from another reality.”

Carmen Parra met the English creator because they were neighbors in a town near Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, where she has lived for three decades, half the year, and they lived together for almost a decade.

The artist, recognized for her long career in issues related to Mexico’s cultural and natural heritage, admits that she has always gone against the current. I have been a total rebel and, of course, I have had to pay bills! Everything has a price in this fucking life, and the highest one I have paid is the highest one that a human being has: freedom. I am not a group person, I walk alone..

A mural in progress

Carmen Parra welcomes The Day in his studio in San Angel. It is a large and bright room where an imposing collage photographic collection with images of her at different times; many of her son, Emiliano Gironella; of several of her deceased friends, including the writer María Luisa China Mendoza, as well as a black and white portrait of Franz Kafka.

There are also framed works of her own on the walls, and in one of the corners there is an easel with a canvas, as well as a mural in progress. This is the work that the teacher is currently working on, destined for the Fundación del Conde de la Valenciana. At the same time, she continues with her paintings of angels and monarch butterflies, she says, as well as with a series of sculptures of crocodiles and turtles.

My idea is to make 100 turtles that are bigger than the real ones. I’m involved in a campaign because I live in a tourist town where they come to lay eggs, but people don’t give a damn. So I want to raise awareness.

In the talk, the artist alludes to the great curiosity she has had since she was a child, a stage in which her father, the architect Manuel Parra, took her to all the baroque altars, churches, pyramids, indigenous communities, popular markets of the country. A situation that, he acknowledges, forever marked his interest in cultural heritage, specifically that of New Spain.

She considers herself the missing link between the generation of masters of the Mexican School of Painting and the artistic movements that arose throughout the 20th century in Mexico: The great muralists, such as Diego, Orozco and Chávez Morado, dedicated themselves to describing or interpreting the pre-Hispanic world; they had their eyes turned inward (…) There was then a section in limbo: the 300 years of the colonial era, with the viceregal art, the altars, the architecture of the great convents, the formation of that mestizo Mexico; then, I entered into that world..

Evocations

Carmen Parra continues her recollections and brings up topics such as her project of becoming a social anthropologist, which she abandoned in favor of painting; her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and then in graphic design for film in London; her participation in the student movement of 1968 and having to leave for Brazil, where she studied music; her marriage to the artist Alberto Gironella, with whom she had her only son, whose name honors Zapata.

Also, his three-year stay in Europe at the beginning of the 1970s, where he lived with Carlos Fuentes, Juan Soriano, Pedro Coronel and Francisco Toledo, among others, in addition to meeting Julio Cortázar and Milan Kundera; his return to the country in 1976, because My roots are very deep in this Valley of Mexicoand his participation in the founding of The Day, in 1984.

The creator arrives happy at this stage of her existence, “because life has given me, first of all, the opportunity to get to know this incredible country; second, I studied anthropology, a discipline that is common in Mexico, because the gods emerge at every moment, and then, for having met great teachers who taught me a lot, such as Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Héctor Azar, Fernando Benítez… I have been very privileged. That has given me the energy to continue and propose with my work the rescue of the country’s viceregal and natural heritage.”

In his opinion, art cannot be separated from social commitment: I have never been a gallery painter; I am interested in selling my works, but I do not do them with that purpose. My proposal is a reflection of our roots, because, as long as we do not know them, we will not have wings to fly..