Dissapearing

landscapes

OF MEXICO

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Fernando Aceves is a traveling painter who goes on an excursion with his artist's accoutrements in his backpack, in search of landscapes. His task is tributary to the outdoor painting practiced by the Impressionists, but before and in a manner indicated by the romantic naturalists, whose imprint was essential in the Mexican landscape of the 19th and 20th centuries. Those naturalist painters who explored the Mexican paradise by studying its geographical relief, cataloging its botanical and zoological wealth, making a visual census of its population and discovering its antiquity in the archaeological remains, shaped an aesthetic activity that can be summed up in one sentence: " Run the world to make the world. " This is what Fernando Aceves revitalizes.

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Of course, making a world is not going from one place to another, and the world to be known is not restricted to the globe. Mundus is the unity of the earthly with the celestial and the subterranean. It is the universe, but always that includes the lower plane, the "world below" or infernal world. Fernando Aceves is particularly sensitive to this tripartite unity because he has collaborated as an artist with archaeological rescue teams, making pictorial records at the site of the excavations. These experiences have left a definitive mark on his conception of the Mexican landscape, where the paradisiacal is touched with the infernal. Nothing could be further from his practice than the innocence of the decorative landscape. There is no purely "aesthetic" landscape. Historically, every landscape has mundus content, associated with philosophy, science, politics, history and today, of course, with ecology. In this string, the landscapes of Fernando Aceves link the cosmic with the telluric, and his understanding of the personal journey has an initiatory bias when incorporating the transit to the underworld according to the Mesoamerican myths of death, which he expresses through all kinds of associations meteorological and tectonic, as through the recurrent presence of dogs in his painting: companions in the world and guides of the souls in the afterworld…

Jaime Moreno Villarreal