By Sallie Lewis
Inside the Mexico City studio of Pedro Diego Alvarado, sunlight streams through a wall of glass onto worn wooden easels and tables laid with long silver rulers, jars jammed with brushes, and dried ears of corn. Alvarado’s dog chases butterflies in the garden as the painter leafs through a stack of small studies on paper. Amongst the colorful lilies, magueys, and market scenes are photographs of familiar faces, including that of his grandfather, the iconic Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera.
Alvarado was just a baby when his grandfather died in 1957, but he and his mother, Architect Ruth Rivera, lived in Rivera’s famous studio for more than a decade. Today that space in the San Ángel neighborhood houses not only a museum dedicated to Rivera and Frida Kahlo but also many of Alvarado’s most cherished childhood memories. “I remember almost everything,” he says of the studio, with its papier-mâché skeletons, pre-Columbian pottery, and flasks filled with pigment. “I knew my grandfather through his personal things.”
These days, Alvarado, who is 66, is a revered painter in his own right, a calling first influenced not by his grandfather but by the stars. Alvarado studied physics and astronomy and remembers his world shifting after listening to a researcher speak about the origins of life. Subsequently, he marvels that infinite beauty in the form of plants, flowers, and fruits, to name a few things, surrounds humanity. “Everything is important if you look at it that way.”
Alvarado started drawing and photography classes at Academia de San Carlos. Around the same time Alvarado’s grandmother—Rivera’s second wife, Guadalupe Marín—returned from Europe with a catalogue of drawings by her friend, the famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Overwhelmed by Cartier-Bresson’s work, Alvarado went to Paris in pursuit of his own artistic awakening. He enrolled at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts to study drawing and for the next almost three years leaned on the mentorship of Cartier-Bresson.
When Alvardo returned to Mexico in 1979 to contemplate painting full time, his grandfather’s stature in the art world began to sink in. “I doubted being an artist” in Rivera’s shadow, Alvarado recalls. “But after a while, I thought that, if I’m honest with myself, and I live in a different time, then I could be a painter because it is different. Everything is different.”
Over the four decades since, the artist has continued to paint his country’s fruits, flowers, vegetables, and landscapes as a tribute to the natural world. His vibrant oils illuminate the bounty and beauty of market fare, for example, from the electric flesh of a dragon fruit to the glistening seeds of a pomegranate. “In Mexico we have this special light,” he explains. “It’s very important, the light I feel and see when I paint. That’s what makes my painting Mexican.”
This will be his first show at the respected art gallery Intersección Arte Contemporáneo in San Miguel de Allende.
Opening
Pedro Diego Alvarado
“La Naturaleza de la Imaginación”
Sat, Aug 13, 5-8pm
Interseccion Gallery
Fábrica La Aurora s/n
Free admission
