Antonio López Sáenz was born in the port of Mazatlán, in the tropic of Cancer, so called because at the beginning of the summer solstice, in the northern hemisphere, the sun reaches its highest point in the constellation of Cancer, and is located exactly on that parallel or imaginary line.
Antonio López Sáenz was born in the port of Mazatlán, in the tropic of Cancer, so called because at the beginning of the summer solstice, in the northern hemisphere, the sun reaches its highest point in the constellation of Cancer, and is located exactly on that parallel or imaginary line.
The sun, the imagination and the port will be decisive in the formation of man and his work.
A port is a door, either of entry or exit. Suitcase that opens and becomes a welcome or farewell. A port is a meeting place; a customs house of dreams and realities, of triumphs and failures, of laughter and tears.
People of various backgrounds and nationalities flock to a port: sailors and travelers, adventurers and merchants, who come and go to the rhythm of the tides. In this liquid space, ships loaded with goods from the seven seas plow. When we speak of ships, we evoke the image of ocean liners and their huge chimneys, of cargo ships and sailing ships, of large cranes for loading and unloading, boats, nets and fishing tools, as well as the mysterious and shocking sound of their sirens.
But a port is also a stay, a permanence. It is the daily life of the fisherman, the merchant, the stevedores, the walks along the boardwalk and the crashing of the waves; of bathers on the beach waiting for the child who with his bucket and shovel builds castles and ephemeral fantasies.
All these images populate the pictorial universe of López Sáenz. References to the baseball game, the Sunday walk, the town bands, the serenades, the banquets, the male and female nudes, at siesta time… and the party continues.
The artist portrays a past time, frozen –but wonderfully– by the magic of his brush. His paintings resemble a scrapbook of a Mazatlán that is gone forever, where the characters, mysteriously, have no faces and yet maintain their identity, thanks to the observing eye of the artist.
They are portraits of yesterday, today and forever; of everyday life and pleasure, the pleasure of living it.
López Sáenz creates his own world, a friendly world, where there are no fights, drunks or prostitutes. The author becomes part of the painting, a secondary protagonist who testifies already naked, already on his old bicycle, what happens in the painting.
López Sáenz chronicles his city from the port of Mazatlán, located in the Tropic of Cancer, but it is a tropic where the sun shines benign and merciful.
The sunlight in his paintings, harsh and hard, is filtered, passed through a filter, does not burn; his characters do not give the impression of sweating and we see many of them in the sun's rays dressed in jackets and ties, unperturbed.
His palette is very rich in soft colors that do not correspond to reality, to the scorching sun of Mazatlán, why?
It is a very personal point of view of the questioner. I have a light, which is my own light, which illuminates my world. It is the light of Mazatlán and is recognized by those who inhabit it and know it well. I have a light like silver dust or lime dust in my work. My own house is white, the walls are white. There is no stridency whatsoever.
Social criticism does not appear in his painting, however it is a family chronicle of friends and relatives and townspeople. Do you consider yourself a chronicler of the city?
I have just been named "Graphic Chronicler of the city and port of Mazatlán", and I belong to the "Colegio de Sinaloa", made up of ten distinguished Sinaloans in various branches of intellectual and scientific endeavor.
At what point did your interest in art and painting emerge?
My childhood was spent on the beach. There I played with my friends. I liked to feel and play with the sand wet and smooth from the waves. That was my first fabric. One day I took a stick and began to draw the silhouette of a man. What a pleasure I was able to do it! On the beach he found colored stones, shells, algae, pieces of wood polished by the coming and going of the waves. I spent my time painting and making clay figures. As I grew up I felt the need to dedicate myself to art, but at that time there was no one in Mazatlán who could guide my vocation; my parents found out but they did not have the economic capacity to send me to study in the capital and the day came when I had to contribute to the maintenance. My father was a warehouse manager, a customs officer by profession, and was in contact with the ships arriving at the port. He decided he should work at the loading docks. I started working from elementary school and I fell in love forever with the big ships that appear in my canvases: “love of the landscape where you were born and where you lived in your childhood”.
In your paintings, the characters get smaller, longer, inflamed, what is their purpose?
Besides being a painter, I'm also a sculptor, and they explained to me that that's why I give that volume to my characters. I have no purpose. It is my personal expression. I was also young and avant-garde, until it was time to define myself artistically and I discovered it when people began to apply for my job. My characters don't need to have eyes, mouths, or teeth to convey the desired vision. The mere presence of the volume says: "I'm horny, usurer, nice." It is a reality, but it is a reality transformed by me.
At the age of seventeen, López Sáenz traveled to Mexico City to study painting at the Academia de San Carlos, located at that time, 1953, two blocks from the National Palace. He is studying Master in Plastic Arts and Art History. It is there, in the old part of the city, where you discover the charm of the Mexican markets, the magic of their characteristic colors, smells and flavors. He lives in very difficult economic conditions and learns the trade of a painter very well.
López Sáenz has presented his work in Sinaloa, Nuevo León, Federal District, Jalisco and Morelos. Likewise, he has mounted exhibitions in Washington, Detroit, Miami, Tampa, San Francisco, San Antonio, Chicago, Madrid, Lisbon, Zurich and Paris. Since 1978 he is the exclusive artist of the Estela Shapiro Gallery. In 1995 the most representative of his work was exhibited at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and last year he was awarded a grant from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts.
Lola beltran
"The Queen of the Mexican Song" was born in the town of El Rosario, south of Mazatlán. In front of the local church is his monument, and in the atrium, in the middle of the gardens, his tomb. Lola's family home can be visited and see portraits from different eras of the singer, as well as trophies and the environment where she grew up.
Source: Aeroméxico Tips No. 15 Sinaloa / Spring 2000
