Carlos Mendez

CARLOS MÉNDEZ (Buenos Aires, 1943).
"Homage to Bacon", 1995.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated in the lower left corner, titled on the back.
Measurements: 50 x 46 cm; 79 x 75 cm (frame).
Carlos Méndez was formed in Buenos Aires, among the groups of painters, and began his career making scenographies for theater and ballet. In 1962 he began to exhibit his work, taking it to various Argentine cities, and since 1973 he has also held exhibitions in Paris, Rome and Mexico. Later he studied engraving in New York and San Francisco, and in 1976 he moved to Catalonia. There he exhibited in galleries in Sant Cugat del Vallès and Barcelona. Later his painting was also admired in Colombia, Uruguay, Israel, the United States, Venezuela and Germany. His work was initially based on social realism, but after his arrival in Catalonia his language evolved towards the informalism that developed there from the sixties onwards. Since then, his painting has been closely linked to Magic Realism. Thus, it is common in his work the presence of ambiguous dreamlike spaces, where spectral apparitions of strange characters with undefined faces are staged, treated with a shocking verisimilitude. Méndez uses a figuration inherited from the avant-garde of the beginning of the century, mixing formal distortion with the expressive force of the line, dark and very marked. In his own words, it is a "realistic abstraction", naked forms and focused on the human subject. Today Carlos Méndez has a curriculum that includes almost a hundred exhibitions, and his work is distributed in public and private collections of great relevance.