Rufino Tamayo

The astral landscapes were the first objects that served Rufino Tamayo as a good excuse to geometrize elements. They lead him to semi-abstraction, a path that he cultivated for almost a decade. However, this linear synthesis is always covered with a magnificent array of shapes and colors characteristic of his paintings. The use of geometrical resources are a feature of modernity for Tamayo but as is perhaps the gravitation in the poetics of the painter, lessons that absorbed studying the Cezanne artworks.
Evening Sun, 1958, is a mature artwork in which its apparent simplicity contains the ethical and political conceptual systems of the painter. There rests his vision of the pre-hispanic philosophy and the philosophical concepts of modern existentialists after the war in which the sky was presented as an alternative setting for artistic reflection, for abstraction. Evening Sun represents a sidereal prodigy in which its fanciful synthesis reaches a certain degree of poetic abstraction. With a powerful, colorful contrast, the heavenly prodigy takes place in a realistic scenario; a landscape formed by two overlapping horizons softly suggesting space and time and enable the inclusion of cuttlefish colors that contrast with bold yellow shades in the chrome sky. The star is surrounded by four comets whose tails provide a sense of dynamism to the composition. Thus, Tamayo met in his painting memories of an ancient culture and guidelines for international vanguard, which plays the same points as the abstract expressionism that geometricism plays.
Evening sun is an artwork in which Tamayo shows the exquisite mastery of an exceptional colorist and an artist in possession of his finest technical resources.

We would like to extend our gratitude to Mr. Juan Carlos Pereda, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico, for text and information.