Untitled

César Moro is one of the essential figures in the history of the Latin American avant-gardes, one of the few American artists and poets who can claim a formal and official participation in the surrealist movement. Although better known as a poet, his activity in the graphic arts has gradually been gaining greater recognition. In 1935 he presented in Lima the first surrealist exhibition in Latin America and in 1940, with André Breton and Wolfgang Paalen, he organized the First International Surrealist Exhibition in the city of Mexico. This gouache is one of the most finished works from Moro’s Mexican period, when the artist mixed with the circle of artists and writers associated with Dyn, the journal directed by Paalen and in which Moro himself actively collaborated. The work reflects a moment of change in the trajectory of the artist, whose painting gradually moves away from figuration. This reveals an affinity with the abstract and organic art of the surrealist painters such as Paalen, the French painter André Masson and the British painter Gordon Onslow-Ford.