"Artist of black" presents 3-book series of sketches

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
April 23, 2010

Beatriz Zamora established herself on the Mexico City arts scene by painting three-meter-tall triptychs entirely in black. Throughout the past four decades, she plastered charcoal chunks and glossy obsidian to textured ebony backgrounds at her expansive workshop in the historical center. But since her eviction from the studio six years ago, the artist has found that her now drastically-reduced quarters require a new kind of proposal.

Zamora this year is releasing a collection of 300 small-scale sketches in a three-book series titled “100x100.” Each book contains a hundred drawings paired with another hundred pages of her own poetry; all writings are published in English, Spanish and French.

The 75-year-old artist recently celebrated the publication of the second art book, titled “Los siete caminos del corazón” (“The Seven Paths of the Heart”), at the Pablo Goebel Fine Arts Gallery in Polanco. Her first book, called “Los límites del amor infinito” (“The Limits of Infinite Love”), was published in late January, and the third book is set for release in July.

“I’m a painter, I’m not an illustrator. But I need to do something,” the artist told The News from her one-bedroom apartment in Colonia Cuauhtémoc, where her sketches paper the narrow first-floor hallway and giant black canvases hang prominently on the windowless walls. The rest of her works – three moving vans’ worth – are stored in an Iztapalapa-area bodega, she said.

Zamora recounted that she had been living in her Centro Histórico workshop for nearly 15 years when she began to fall behind on rent payments. In 2004 and without warning, her landlord forced her out and shipped her work to the storage facility on the northeast side of the city, where Zamora says she is still unable to recover the paintings. Since then, the painter has developed new artistic expressions from her modest home while fighting to bring her “arte negro” (“black art”) back into wide open spaces.

“‘Arte negro’ is cosmic,” she explained. “It’s about reminding us that we are all children of the universe. Scientists say that 98 percent of all matter in the universe is dark, and so really, black is the true essence of life. When we forget that, we distance ourselves from our true nature.”

The National System of Creators has awarded Zamora a grant to carry out the project, and the National Council for Culture and the Arts (Conaculta) is printing and distributing the series. Copies of the first two volumes are on sale at Conaculta’s Educal bookstores around Mexico City.

Zamora, who studied at the L’École des Beaux Art institution in Paris, has participated in more than 300 individual and collective exhibitions in Mexico and abroad throughout her 40-year career.

For info on “100x100,” visit http://bz-100x100-02-zamora.blogspot.com.