BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Monday, May 11, 2009
Azul Enzué Durán is a woman wearing a patchwork quilt, grasping balloon strings as she soars toward the sky. She is a little girl with downcast eyes and a swirling siren in a turquoise sea.
She is, at least according to Durán.
A Mexico City native with a decade on the local art scene, Durán uses documentary photography and digital illustration to put into images how she sees herself and the world she lives in.
"Constant growth and expansion . it's something that's very imprinted in me, very internalized," said the 30-year-old artist, whose ebony hair is fittingly marked with a streak of bright blue.
Her latest artistic project, "Estética de la tristeza" ("Aesthetics of Sadness") will revisit such themes in a compilation of personal photographs that chronicle what she calls 13 years of her family's tragedy and heartache.
The display is set to exhibit this summer, but she said she is still in talks with galleries to determine where it will be shown.
"It's a catharsis . to find beauty in my family's pain," she said about the compilation, breaking her nearly constant smile.
Her illustrations touch on the tragic and triumphant as well. They often mix traditional acrylic and water-based paints with typography, graphic design and digital modifications, favoring vibrant colors and images in motion, like swimming fish or streaming tears.
"Sutura privada" ("Private Suture") shows a white-haired woman drifting toward the page's edge, her multipatterned skirt fluttering against a smoky blue background. As her hands weave stitches through her broken heart, a trail of letters reading "bleed" and "heal" trail behind her.
"Al vuelo" ("In Flight") mirrors Durán's proclivity to freedom, with a feather-haired, blue-skinned girl descending from above, arms spread wide as she floats through twisting wisps of purples, blues and greens.
Durán uses more haunting shades in "Se me va la niña que llevaba dentro" ("The Girl I Kept Inside Me Has Gone"). She paints a sea of curling brown and beige waves as a small girl's ghost clings to a balloon bouquet and floats up into the black above.
MOVING UP
Durán said at first it was difficult to enter Mexico City's art world - not for lack of opportunities, but because of the struggle to simultaneously create art and sustain herself financially, she explained, sitting in the studio of her Colonia Roma apartment.
The walls in her home are covered in ardent orange and bright pink paint, embellished with a stark white tree or shimmering gold branches. A dented metal taxi door and a giant wooden wheel sit off to the side, pieces she'll use when inspiration strikes.
"I believe you do it for the love of the art," she said about the challenge. "I dream of living off my art, but it's really hard to do so."
Durán began studying visual arts in 1998 at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, but left after a year to become an activist with civil resistance communities in Chiapas.
Always snapping pictures, she turned her photographs of local indigenous communities into her first exhibit at the Centro Cultural Juan Rulfo in Mexico City's Colonia Mixcoac in 2001.
She continued exhibiting around the city with collectives and groups of other young artists, a support network she still maintains. Meanwhile, she began pooling together resources by working odd jobs and occasionally selling pieces, such as the photographic postcards she sold last year in the Bellas Artes, San Ildefonso and Tem-plo Mayor museums in the Centro Histórico.
In 2004, Durán completed undergraduate studies in graphic design at the city's Autonomous Metropolitan Unviersity, or UAM, and is now searching for graduate programs in Spain or Italy.
"If you want to grow and mature as an artist, it is important to leave Mexico," she insisted.
"To know other cultures and countries and to be in other places is fundamental."
Her second favorite photography exhibit reinforces that concept. "Una mirada por Egipto" ("A Look Through Egypt"), showed in 2007 at the UAM and was partly funded by the Egyptian Embassy in Mexico.
The images capture her journey across the country - travel, she repeated, is essential for her art.
But the Mexican artist isn't scrambling to leave home either; rather, she hopes to travel, return and repeat in a constant search for artistic inspiration.
You can follow Durán's career and find out where her next exhibition will be on her art blog at azulenzue.blogspot.com.
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