Aurelio Pescina

AURELIO PESCINA (Mexico, 1938- 1990).
Untitled.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 60 x 80 cm.
In this work of the Mexican artist Aurelio Pescina, a mountainous landscape of great chromatic richness and narrative sensibility is presented, in which the daily life of the rural world is intertwined with the serene immensity of nature. The composition is clearly structured: in the foreground, a river of calm waters flows through the landscape, bordered by a bank where several female figures, represented with simplified and expressive forms, are engaged in domestic tasks such as washing clothes. These women, harmoniously integrated into the environment, are not mere visual accessories, but bearers of an ancestral everyday life that anchors the scene in the collective memory of Mexican rural life.
In the middle ground and in the background, a series of undulating mountains unfolds, supporting, on one of their slopes, a small village painted with vivid colors and elemental forms. The houses are grouped in a configuration that suggests community, shelter and rootedness, evoking the typical organization of mountain villages. The architecture is represented with a formal simplicity that responds to the naïve or primitivist style that characterizes Pescina's work: a visual language that dispenses with the academic conventions of perspective and modeling, to give way to a direct, emotive and deeply human expression.
Color is undoubtedly one of the central elements of this painting. Pescina uses intense and contrasting tones, saturated greens in the vegetation, bright blues in the river, ochers and reds in the buildings, not as a tool of mimesis, but as a means to accentuate the vitality of the landscape and the symbolic force of the scene. This vibrant palette turns the natural environment into a protagonist, endowed with its own energy and character, in constant dialogue with the human figures.
Far from an idealized or folkloristic vision, Pescina's work conveys a look at the rural world, where the everyday acquires a poetic and contemplative dimension.