MEXICO CITY.- In the context of the history of contemporary painting in Mexico, the work of Lucinda Urrusti (Melilla, Spanish Morocco, 1929) falls under the shadow of a paradox, and to make a long story short, presents us with a problem of interpretation. It comes as little surprise that most critics who have written about her painting have taken a literary approach, formulating a litany of adjectives to describe either her technical abilities or the two most recognizable genres in her oeuvre, still life and portraiture.

Nevertheless, these are just some of the most identifiable facets of this "eccentric" work in the history of painting in Mexico during the twentieth century. I mean "eccentric" in the geometrical sense of the word, namely: work that is off-center in relation to the tendencies of its era, and which thus revolves around a different point.

This artist's most relevant pieces orbit around one of the canonical pictorial experiences of the second half of the twentieth century: l'art informel, rendered as "tachism" in English and informalismo in Spanish. It seems to me that the only person who sensed the informel aspect of Urrusti's painting was Salvador Elizondo, precisely the most heterodox and "informalist" author in Mexican literature. And he did so in just a few impeccable phrases: "In Lucinda Urrusti's paintings one finds the pure emotion of capturing the culmination of form on canvas using only plastic material and the tip of the paintbrush: Emotion made material and tangible. There are neither data nor geometric documentation; nothing is abstract; everything is concrete and real, but nothing is "realistic" or demonstrable…"

This reflection offers a perspicacious understanding of l'art informel and, no doubt, of Urrusti's transcendent "informal" pieces. Following the publication of Michel Tapié's Un art autre in 1952, tachist painters and theorists put their stakes on describing how l'art informel is situated in a place of tension: reality as a background for "material" experience, which Elizondo identifies as "the culmination of form" using pure plastic matter, form that does not refer to anything "demonstrable." As the painter Jean Fautrier pointed out, "Reality must endure in the work. It is the raw material, and the 'living work' is in the form." Elizondo uncovered something similar about Urrusti's painting: everything is concrete and real without being realistic. In other words, her work does not describe reality. Paraphrasing him, her works do not seek to demonstrate anything; they are in themselves the pure sensibility of matter.

In this sense, I would venture to say that within the panorama of contemporary Mexican painting, there is no oeuvre so closely tied to "informal" experience as the core group of Lucinda Urrusti's pieces on display in this exhibition. A careful view of her objects, collages and paintings will confirm that this artist would occupy a privileged place in a possible rewriting of contemporary Mexican painting. A stranger to the modulations of abstraction ("There are neither data nor geometrical documentation," Elizondo reminds us) and to the neo-figurative, expressive experience of the rest of her generation, these works stand out as one of the most daring wagers of contemporary Mexican art to value materiality as an autonomous expressive value: "Emotion made material and tangible."