Francisco Toledo: Art of Magical Mutations.

• Author: Bach, Caleb
• Position: The life, works, and influence of Mexican artist Francisco Toledo - Brief Article

This internationally established artist of Oaxaca, Mexico, blends myth and reality in powerful works that reflect an intense, personal creative process

To view an artwork by Francisco Toledo is to experience a ride on the artist's very instrument, as it makes its trip of discovery across paper or canvas. There is no obfuscation, just the fresh, clear tracks left by the creative act, permitting the viewer to relive what transpired. Toledo does not resort to facile tricks or predictable formulas nor does he repeat himself: He puts his creativity on the line each time.

Toledo mostly paints or draws animals or at least presents situations in which creatures wild and domestic predominate. Anatomical correctness a la Durer or Audubon is not his goal. Instead he dares to rival the Divine Creator himself by reinventing animals or at least redefining our sense of what they can be and do. In Toledo's wild kingdom, disparate species consort in unimaginable ways, call all the shots, and even mock humankind for its self-centeredness, inhibitions, and ignorance of irrevocable rules of nature. Like a shaman initiated into the spirit world of animals, Toledo seems privy to his creatures' secrets, magical ways, perhaps even control of human destiny. He is not a storyteller who narrates in a literal fashion regional myths and legends but rather a maker of Promethean proportions. The world he knows ferments in the potent juices of an intensely personal imagination rendered in visual language accessible to all.

Remaining silent has never been difficult for Toledo, especially when it comes to talking about himself. He lets his work speak, and he stays, enigmatically, in the shadows. The smallest bits and pieces of his life that have gained currency, often contradictory, do not form a coherent picture because, as one of his friends says, Toledo fosters "variable truths and contradictions."

Nonetheless, it is known that Francisco Benjamin Lopez Toledo was born on July 17, 1940, in the village of San Vicente near Juchitan in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. While growing up he lived with a variety of family members. His father moved a good deal in search of work, but during the oil boom in Veracruz he opened a grocery store in Minatitlan on the northern side of the isthmus. As a boy, Toledo visited his father, fed dogs that guarded the store, and scared away the crows that tried to steal the dog food. In those days the youngster was called Min or Mincho, from Benjamin, also the name of his grandfather, a cobbler who regaled his grandson with fanciful stories while instilling in him a strong sense of craftsmanship. The shoes his grandfather made, mostly for prosperous army personnel, seemed strange to the boy, who went barefoot. Eventually they took on a pejorative connotation in Toledo's work as evocations of power, the military, and confinement (for which reason the artist still prefers to go barefoot).

Toledo also lived periodically with an aunt who often entertained her nephew with Zapotec and Huave folktales. Thus at a formative stage Toledo absorbed a trove of lore destined to inspire much of his later work. Among the countless mythic creatures she described were four-eyed fish (two for seeing above the water, two for below); the rainbow turtle, which controlled the rain; and la lechera, the milkmaid snake that suckled women's breasts and stifled infants' cries by inserting its tail in their mouths. Among his favorite stories were the endless exploits of the clever bus cocky rabbit who, like the roadrunner of the southwestern United States, always bested the coyote.

As a boy Toledo would sweep with a broom armies of toads that invaded the house during the rainy season, cautiously cross riverbanks blanketed in crabs, or marvel at clouds of bats that filled the sky at dusk. As a result, a fecund plenitude would later become a trademark of many Toledo paintings: fetid stews of crabs, iguanas, crocodiles, and a dense delirium of barnyard animals and household pets. He also paid homage to lesser creatures--grasshoppers, sacred in the Zapotec cosmos; tiny, toxic scorpions; and especially bees, which were attracted to a syrupy ooze that dripped from rain-soaked sugar sacks in the family store.

Toledo moved to the city of Oaxaca when he was a teenager and lived with an uncle while attending school. Assignments often involved drawing, which came easily, and he volunteered to do extra art projects to avoid required homework. Toledo's father imagined his son becoming a lawyer but his uncle, more a realist, noted his nephew's facility as a draftsman and enrolled him at the local Escuela de Bellas Artes. In 1955 Toledo saw a traveling exhibition of paintings by Siqueiros, Rivera, and Tamayo, his first exposure to work by major artists. Soon after he transferred to the Taller de Grafica Popular in Oaxaca, run by Arturo Garcia Bustos and Rina Lazo, but the assignments were highly politicized so, without telling his family, Toledo dropped out to work on his own. In 1958 he moved to Mexico City to attend the Escuela de Diseno y Artesanias (within the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes), where he...