Manuel Miguel: Art and social commitment flourish in the Sierra Oaxaqueña

The Oaxacan mountains hide enigmas to share with society. For Manuel Miguel, art is about constant observation, like a book to be read every day.

That book that Manuel found in a library in his community, released all his creative content, as if a provocative oracle whispered to him. An absent messenger whose most famous phrase: “Death is democratic,” unleashed the creative fury of that young man from Teocucuilco de Marcos Pérez, Oaxaca; who, restless among the harvest, began to generate his first strokes on the land.

His passion for drawing led him to break down the paradigms established by the Academy and he found in his own nature: a force of expression necessary to build a constant dialogue with everything that surrounded him.

In the workshops of great Oaxacan masters, he found the necessary tools to generate his own pictorial poetics and an accurate social discourse.

The passion for his work is an intense tide that, for all of us who have had the opportunity to visit his workshop, immerses us in a world where creativity is revealed in all its splendor; in this revelation, words are not enough and get stuck in our teeth. It makes us reflect on a deep sea where we can only remain silent.

His understanding of working with materials is implacable in all the techniques that Manuel explores. The understanding of the contemporary brings us back to the roots that Manuel never lets go of and that every day he unravels and, at night before going to sleep, they get tangled up again. In him, the work is prodigious, it never betrays him and rather accompanies him.

Her work establishes connections with everything we cannot observe, and it intensifies when everything begins to manifest itself before us. The colors in her works move to find their place in these worlds, in constant movement and communicating with each other. Her work releases sounds that conquer silence with their luminosity and with certainty in the strokes, containing an ancestral DNA.

In his works, colour is a complex visual binder, of perceptive actions coinciding with the act of seeing. For Manuel, colour is no longer local or forged in a specific environment; it is the result of cunning and instinctive technique. The images are transformed into authentic chromatic spaces that transmit the life of the painting.

Manuel’s work is not only that of an artist or creator, it is more like a Tlacuilo: he never takes his foot off his social environment, his homeland. He detaches himself and then re-adheres to the matters of the “real”, giving it a condition and commitment to his state. A work of duality reflected in his pieces.

His social work contains the same value as his work. He is the creator of social and cultural projects that promote the work of his culture. Among these projects is “Las rutas escultóricas”, spaces that provide young and experienced artists with the opportunity to interact around art and culture since 2018.

Immersed in the cultural development of his community, Manuel Miguel inaugurated in October 2023 “The Arch of the Mountain Brotherhood” as a symbol of the union of the Oaxacan identity in the mountain region. A long-term project that plans to be carried out in the 8 regions of the state of Oaxaca.

Concern about environmental pollution led him to create “devices/sculptures” that function as collectors of PET waste and other polluting materials and, once transformed into works of art, modify everyday space and promote social awareness among the community’s inhabitants and its visitors.

The intensity of living like a hummingbird and its ability to share is Oaxacan in nature: giving without asking for anything in return. Under this premise, currently its personal collection circulates in the 8 regions of Oaxaca, and is shared throughout the state, in cultural centers and in town houses.

His unconditional support for young Oaxacans in different disciplines such as film, dance, theater or popular music, has positioned him as a promoter of his own culture and, above all, an artist concerned with the artistic formation of Oaxaca.

It is rare to meet a human being like Manuel Miguel, the exception to the rule is evident in his work: precise and decisive. Only the mountains and the countryside give seeds that transform other lives with their extraordinary energy.

Social networks

Instagram: @manuelmiguel_art

Facebook: Manuel Miguel

Website

www.manuelmiguel.com.mx

¹¹¹ “Death is democratic, because, at the end of the day, whether blonde, brunette, rich or poor, everyone ends up being a skull” quote by José Guadalupe Posadas.