| CAMINO A LA MODERNIDAD / THE PATH TO MODERNITY: MEXICAN MODERN PAINTING (2009–10) | received the international distinction ‘Red Dot Award: Communication Design 2010’. The work was exhibited at ‘Design on Stage — Winners Red Dot Award: Communication Design 2010’(09.12.2010–09.01.2011), Red Dot Design Museum, Essen, Germany). Red Dot on Tour (4—27.04.2011) followed it, at Basel School of Art and Design, Switzerland. As part of the series of exhibitions ‘Red Dot on Tour’, the work was also exhibited in design and art museums worldwide during 2010–2012.

 
     
           
  CAMINO A LA MODERNIDAD / THE PATH TO MODERNITY: MEXICAN MODERN PAINTING (Catalogue and dummy)
Singapore Art Museum (SAM)
, Singapore

Edited by: Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; the National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico, 2009
Graphic design: Danné Ojeda

English and Spanish Texts
216 pp, 17.6 x 25 cm,
Full color illustrations
ISBN 978–981–08–4221

 

  One of the main characteristics of the modern Mexican painting is that it aims to develop a new way of seeing Mesoamerican culture, history and legacy. It does so by a pictorial language that encourages the viewer to re-evaluate both Mexican identity and the very medium of painting itself.
This catalogue focuses on the topics of painting and portraiture, and takes its inspiration from the modern maxim of installing ‘new possible ways of re-presentation’. The raw quality of the catalogue is
  inspired by the anti-normative tradition of painting that characterizes Mexican open-air painting schools. These schools were meant for the masses and were characterized by a spirit of experimentation. They rejected the academic prescribed manners of representing reality.
The catalogue has four sections of different sizes. This structure produces a sculptural effect that resembles a pyramid. Inspired by ceremonial Mesoamerican pyramids, such a structure was chosen as an

allegory of the eternal cycle of the human/divine creation that Mexican culture has been engaged with since the pre-Columbian until modern times. The structure of the catalogue also appears as a canvas mounted on a three-dimensional frame. This effect continues inside the book, as the pages seem to come out of a pictorial frame. Words play as colours, letters and drop caps stand up as pure lines. The book and its pages perform a series of paintings.   D-FILE | © 2003-2018