Víctor Echeverría’s new mixed media artworks are visual poetic notes of a witness to Oaxaca’s history. It’s like a kind of transparent coloristic imagism that adds a personal layer to these black and white photo negatives of places he captured years ago in Oaxaca, at Lastoch Tlacochahuaya and Mitla. Echeverría was part of the third generation of artists that studied with Rufino Tamayo in Oaxaca. Like frescoes on photography, Echeverría’s new mixed media works are painted with bright ink colors but their source remains the original photos. Bright pink watermelons float freely in front of a classic adobe building typical of the region. The work is a tribute to Rufino Tamayo’s own family, who were fruit sellers in Oaxaca, something that deeply impacted the artist’s imagery. A tribute to the Oaxaca region’s remarkable community history, Echeverría’s color tonalities and painting actions embroider on these photo images of the architecture, streets, doorways, windows and of Oaxaca. As a visual testament to the Oaxacan peoples’ permacultural persistence and presence, Echeverría’s brightly painted panoptic view is beautiful. Trees painted green near Santo Domingo church are resonant and lively. The painterly actions add new life to the original photo. An old Oaxaca doorway, repaired times over with metal patches becomes a template for a near abstract painting. Each of the patches resonates, starts a composition. For Víctor Echeverría, the art of art is in the act of re-painting. A painterly layer, transposed onto black and white photo negatives of Oaxaca breathes a temporal continuity into the original source – Oaxaca,

— John K. Grande

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