Hopscotch. Paris Lost Julio

The polyptych forms part of the University of Guadalajara’s collection, thanks to a donation made to the Latin American Julio Cortázar Lecture Series, in May 2003, by writer Juan García Ponce (1932-2003), winner of the 2001 Juan Rulfo Prize for Latin American and Caribbean Literature. The series is made up by 22 pictures from 22 Mexican painters, paying tribute to the famous author of the novel Rayuela (Hopscotch). The work was included in the collection of the Museum of Art (MUSA) in 2015.

The piece emerged at Cortázar’s death, in 1984, when García Ponce invited a group of painters to depict a passage from the novel, originally published in 1963. Rayuela impacted the literary world and broke paradigms on how to tackle reading, as it can be read from any point, without losing track of the conflicts and love affairs of La Maga and Horacio Oliveira.

This collective painting, which García Ponce entitled París se quedó sin Julio (Paris Lost Julio), takes up the idea of the game hopscotch known in Argentina as rayuela and in Mexico as bebeleche or avión, to assemble a polyptych of interchangeable pieces that provide several readings, without losing their independent value. As in the children’s game, it is made up by nine squares, some subdivided, and follows the outline of the street drawing until it reaches the sky, a circle found on the final part, marked by the number ten, which in Cortázar’s case symbolizes Oliveira’s incessant quest to achieve something that never materialized.