By Rodrigo Díaz Guerrero
Alejandro Mejía, born in Mexico City in 1981, is an artist who has lived in San Miguel de Allende for six years. His work is an interesting dialogue between graphics, sculpture, and installation. Graduated in plastic arts from La Esmeralda, the renowned National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Engraving, he has participated in various exhibitions in Mexico and in Orleans, France, and Venice, Italy, to mention a few examples. His pieces are a challenge in terms of perception which easily refer us to fundamental geometries and biological structures as well as unsuspected technologies—movement, perception, and space where infinite vanishing points that cause aesthetic dizziness —if I may use the expression— merge in a work where technique and cleanliness are essential aspects. I spoke with him about the tasks of art and its role in teaching—a talk that I am happy to share with you here:
RDG: There are many ways of defining and approaching art, but one that seems undeniable to me is its function as a medium or exploration vehicle. An artist is moved, reflects, and provokes with his work. What does Alejandro Mejía explore, what does he intend to find with the artistic exercise?
AM: Art is the niche where I have been able to think and freely associate all my interests, setting aside for a moment the stress of survival—it allows me to do, think, question, find, lose myself, wander, feel, ponder, try, show, give feedback, rethink, and even live with and despite it. I am in the creative exercise—I do not think I discover anything fundamental or relevant to others but by showing myself fully as someone who functions in society but who also allows himself to experiment and think through objects and images—perhaps I find in art a sense of belonging with others. My influences come from various fields, a lot from reading in science, literature, music, and cinema; but there is definitely an interest, first of all, in reading my own relationship with reality, understanding or approaching my sensibility, and from that reflecting myself in each piece—discovering myself as an entity of my time and circumstances in order to have a point of contrast with the current situation.
RDG: A few days away from commemorating Teacher’s Day, can you share something about your career as a teacher?
AM: Before receiving a degree, I was already giving classes to individuals, but I started in the public sphere in the CDMX high schools in 2008 and from there I have not stopped—from workshop classes to theory such as drawing, painting, sculpture, engraving, materials, color theory, techniques and procedures, advanced composition, creative thinking, art history and theory. I am currently teaching at two institutions: the Instituto Allende and the Instituto Tecnológico Sanmiguelense as well as a drawing workshop at La Biblioteca.
RDG: In the words of Louis Michel, an educator and combatant in the Paris Commune (1871), «The task of the teachers, those dark soldiers of civilization, is to give the people the intellectual means to rebel.” Can and/or should art be a means to rebel? AM: It is a means of reflection and this can lead you to a conflict with the state or with established notions, but it is not inherent to rebellion, rather to constant questioning, as long as it is adopted as a way of contemporary thought of the present and of the future context in which we operate. Art communicates and therein also lies a certain responsibility with what is said so it should not be taken lightly, and it is worth entering seriously into the study of expressiveness and its personal repercussions and the immediate social circle; taking an active role in human development and not just as a producer of decorative items. The rebellion in any case stems from the fact of recognizing our practice as relevant and also, from the culture, modeling the needs of a community, state, or country.
