José Reyes Meza was born in Tampico, Tamaulipas, in 1924, eighty years ago, although to tell the truth time has stopped on him.
Endowed with enormous intellectual restlessness and a great capacity to enjoy life, his appearance is that of a much younger man, and this is manifested in all his actions.
A friendly and easygoing man, his conversation is peppered with jokes and witty phrases around the topics that are part of his personal universe: bullfighting, cooking and painting (which is another way of cooking).
His curious and reflective nature has led him to venture into various fields of the plastic arts: drawing theory, mural and easel painting, book illustration and theatrical set design, standing out in all of them.
Like so many other provincial students, he was forced to emigrate to Mexico City to continue his studies, and at 18 he entered the National Institute of Anthropology and History, where he discovered painting and theater. In the company of other students, he founded the Autonomous Student Theater and began to develop an intense stage activity. At the age of 24, he enrolled in the National School of Plastic Arts, where he received academic instruction from Francisco Goytia, Francisco de la Torre and Luis Sahagún.
Reyes Meza works tirelessly and travels the length and breadth of our country, either in his work as a set designer or as a muralist, carrying out assignments for state governments and private clients. As a set designer at the National Institute of Fine Arts, UNAM, Social Security, the Classical Theater and the Spanish Theater of Mexico, musical magazines and cabaret, his activity spans more than 25 years.
Reyes Meza has made murals in Los Angeles, at the University of Tamaulipas, at the National Museum of History, at the Public Property Registry, at the Raudales de Malpaso Dam in Chiapas, at the Casino de la Selva in Cuernavaca and many more. in churches throughout the Republic. He has been a founding member of various plastic arts societies and has received awards and recognitions from universities and official institutions. Currently his work is part of several private collections, as well as museums in Mexico and the United States.
José Reyes Meza has made “Mexico and the Mexican” his most important concern, and this has been reflected in his professional work. His composition and his brushstrokes have received the praise of critics specialized in art and his series of bulls and still lifes (living natures, as he usually says) are notable, where he incorporates color, light, flavors and the typical elements of our land. But let the teacher tell us something about his life:
MY THREE VOCATIONS AS ONE: PAINTING
Three vocations were born with me: painter, bullfighter and cook; painting predominated as a destination for life. Bullfighting was my childhood and youth sport, with no other pretensions than to satisfy my secondary vocational drive. From 1942 to 1957 I made a pilgrimage throughout the Mexican Republic looking for the opportunity to participate in groping, capeas and town runs; In those encounters I found the deepest part of that mysterious Tauric essence, which, participating in a mystical-religious-indigenous syncretism, contributed to the euphoria of the festivities so characteristic of the peoples of Mexico: improvised arenas and little squares adorned with paper garlands from China, where you could breathe the smell of the stable and pulque. The town band, with some languid and other surprisingly out of tune, announced pasodobles and enlivened the bullfights, how I miss it!
It was 1935 and I got my first job in Tampico when I was eleven years old: a kitchen boy at the restaurant of the English oil company El Águila, now PEMEX. I was happy as a cook apprentice, as I obeyed my third vocational impulse. There I discovered the beginning of everything, the joy of living through that transcendent act of magic that is the kitchen; it carries something or much of mysticism, it is linked to a vital act of the man who from the beginning is with the Word, because in the verb are the words and in the words the recipe, and in the recipe the action of creating - kitchen of through and therefore fire - materializing, as it were, the flavors, perfumes, colors and textures of the substances that God creates and lives on earth, in water and in air. An experience that laid the foundations for me to carry out still lifes, not still life but alive, in a perennial stillness where the beauty of life manifested lasts forever. Life manifested that in an act of cooking is transmuted to feed the body, and in an act of pictorial cooking it is transmuted to feed the spirit.
My three vocations concentrated in one: painting; Well, the theme of bulls has been recurrent in my pictorial work and cooking gave me and continues to give me the joy of making it and enjoying it. My mural and scenographic work are cooked apart.
Source: Aeroméxico Tips No. 30 Tamaulipas / Spring 2004
