Santa Loca (Crazy Saint), Rafael Coronel

Exhibition Label:
“Selecciones: Mexican Art from the Collection,” Nov-2005, Kate Meyer
The Spencer Museum is pleased to present four new gifts from Elizabeth Schultz, all created by Mexican artist Rafael Coronel in the 1960s. Coronel’s paintings and drawings are shown here alongside highlights from the museum’s collection of twentieth-century Mexican works on paper. This display invites the viewer to consider Coronel’s connections to works by other Mexican artists. Can affinities be found between Coronel’s imagery and the iconography employed by his contemporaries and predecessors? Or, does Coronel’s modernism stand out, perhaps suggesting global, rather than national, comparisons?
Born in central Mexico, in the city of Zacatecas, Rafael Coronel moved to Mexico City to study painting at the age of twenty. In the early 1960s, his work was associated with Los Interioristas (The Insiders). This group of artists responded to the era’s global tensions by creating pieces that acknowledged the importance of, and difficulties faced by, the individual in society. Coronel’s art from this period is characterized by macabre images of lonely figures, rendered in expressive brushstrokes and isolated against nondescript backgrounds.