DocumentaryArtist PortraitArt and CreationIdentityLegacyReflectiveNostalgicContemplativeContemporaryMexican Art History
This documentary follows Mexican artist Manuel Felguérez, now in his late eighties, as he works on "Crysalis," a new sculpture made from a dismantled Volkswagen, while reflecting on six decades of his career. Through interviews with the artist, his wife Meche, longtime collaborators, and fellow members of Mexico's "Ruptura" generation, the film traces his path from Boy Scout to founding figure of Mexican abstract art, exploring his fascination with chaos, order, and geometry as creative principles.
Cultural ContextUnderstand every reference — in your frame of view
Mexico (Mexico City and Zacatecas), with formative episodes in Paris, London and Boston · From the artist's 1947 youth through six decades of work into his late 80s — The story tracks Mexico's cultural shift from post-Revolution muralism toward modern abstract art.
Order within chaosThe disruptive vocationLifelong creation and mortalityLove and partnership as foundation for art
“It's the story of anyone who spends a lifetime facing the blank page and choosing, again and again, to make something new rather than repeat themselves.”
✦Boy Scout
Felguérez's scouting trip through postwar Europe as a teenager, mentioned throughout, was the accident of fate that first exposed him to great art and set his life's course.
✦Jorge Ibargüengoitia
A celebrated Mexican novelist and satirist, Felguérez's lifelong friend, whose books recount the very moment the young artist declared himself a painter.
✦Notre-Dame, the Sistine Chapel and the Mona Lisa
These European masterworks delivered the young Mexican traveler his first overwhelming encounters with art, an emotional jolt he compares to being struck by lightning.
✦Turner at the National Gallery
J.M.W. Turner, the English painter famous for luminous ships and storms; seeing his work in London inspired Felguérez to sketch the Thames and sign his first drawing as a painter.
✦Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros
Mexico's giants of state-sponsored muralism and members of the Communist Party; their politically committed public art was the establishment that Felguérez's generation rebelled against.
✦Generación de la Ruptura
Literally 'the breaking generation,' the loose circle of Mexican artists, writers and musicians of the late 1950s who broke from nationalist muralism to pursue individual, abstract, international styles.
✦Zona Rosa
A fashionable Mexico City neighborhood of cafés, cinemas and new galleries where this artistic circle gathered; their movement grew out of friendship and conversation rather than any formal manifesto.
✦Elena Poniatowska and the Premio Cervantes
A revered Mexican writer-journalist who chronicled this generation; the Cervantes Prize she won in 2013 is the most prestigious literary honor in the Spanish-speaking world.
✦Volkswagen (the 'Vocho')
Felguérez dismantles a Volkswagen Beetle for his sculpture 'Crisálida' precisely because the car is a humble, universally familiar object woven into everyday Mexican life.
✦López Velarde and Zacatecas
The opening verses praise the poet's home state; Ramón López Velarde, Mexico's beloved national poet from Zacatecas, evoked its cruel blue sky and red earth, the landscape of Felguérez's childhood.
✦The Osaka Murals (Expo '70)
Works painted by the Ruptura generation for Mexico's pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World's Fair; shipped but never displayed, they were rediscovered and finally shown three decades later.
✦Portal 1808 and Primo de Verdad
A public sculpture honoring Francisco Primo de Verdad y Ramos, a Mexico City councilman who in 1808 argued that sovereignty rests with the people, an early spark of the independence movement.
