PEDRO CORONEL Was born on March 25, 1922 in Jerez, Zacatecas, in a family of upper middle class. His mother played the violin and his father the clarinet and the violin. On Sundays they gathered and played folk music. The youngest of his brothers and sisters, Rafael, became a well-known painter of Moors, monks and elders. Pedro was a restless, dreamer and very rebellious child. He did not like school, he often skipped classes that took twelve years to complete his primary education. Instead, he preferred to go to the quarry and watch the workers take pieces of stone from the mountain. As a child, I collected tops, marbles and puppets. This hobby would later become a large collection of art from various parts of the world. His interest in art led him to study at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving “La Esmeralda” when he was only thirteen, when the school had teachers like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Frida Kahlo and Francisco Zúñiga. Colonel forged friendships with Rivera, Zuñiga and Santos Balmori. He began studying sculpture, but the influence of Santos Balmori encouraged him to paint. This led him to appreciate the uses of color. At the beginning of his artistic career, he visited Paris in 1946, and decided to turn it into his second home in the late 1940s until the 1950s. He divided half into Paris and half into Mexico City. In the 1960s, he was a professor at La Esmeralda, residing mainly in Mexico but traveling frequently to Europe, Asia and the United States. During this time, he also worked with Mathias Goeritz, Rufino Tamayo and Pedro Friedeberg at the Camino Real Hotel in Mexico City. Coronel has been characterized by having a strong personality and, sometimes, violent, in addition to giving brusque answers. However, it has also been characterized for being honest and fair. He said that “he who does not cry, he who does not tremble, has no right to live”. It refers to “life” in the sense of feeling. He said he feared death just because he would end his painting. He was briefly married to Amparo Dávila, a Mexican writer, but his long-term relationship of eighteen years was with his second wife, Réjane Lalonde. Throughout his life, he accumulated a large collection of pre-Hispanic, African, Asian, Greco-Roman and medieval art, along with graphic art, with more than 1,800 pieces from different places and times, including Roman, Egyptian and Chinese works, as well as art and crafts. From Africa, the Mexican colonial period and works by Goya, Picasso, Miró and Chagall. This collection was exhibited shortly before the death of Coronel and the reaction of the public led him to donate it to the Mexican people and, since 1986, it has been part of the permanent collection of a museum that bears his name in Zacatecas . Coronel died on May 23, 1985 in Mexico City. In 1986, his remains were moved to Zacatecas according to his will, now in the Pedro Coronel Museum.
ALBERTO CRUZ (1982) was born in Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, Oaxaca. He holds a Bachelor’s in Visual Arts from the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca. Printmaking is Alberto’s main means of production. In 2016 he was the recipient of the Takeda award at the 5th Shinzaburo Takeda Biennial. The work of Alberto focuses on childhood and innocence; his narrative is pure and simple. From his ludic and mysterious thread, each piece tells us a world of possibilities. The artist’s main reference is children’s illustration in which he finds a personal language to create his work. Alberto is currently one of the members of Burro Press.
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