Mar de Lurin (Rojo)

“Lurín is a desolate and mysterious desert,” Szyszlo observed of the arid, coastal landscape that inspired a superb series of paintings and prints in the late 1980s and early 1990s.1 Steeped in ancient, pre-Inca ritual lore, the Lurín Valley was the site of a sacred shrine to Pachacámac, an oracular deity associated with earthquakes, that was destroyed by the Spanish conquistador Hernando Pizarro. Szyszlo’s telluric abstraction distills the drama of the Andean universe through deeply saturated colors, here layered in lyrical, tonal monochromes of red, blue, and brown. The geometric patterning of chevrons and dots recalls traditional textile design, elevated by the Inca and expressive of cosmic and imperial order. In this print from the "Mar de Lurín" series, the semi-transparent overlay of inks yields a fluid, painterly surface that preserves the gestural expression of Szyszlo’s brush, wielded in broad swaths of color. The undulating horizontality of the landscape is bisected in the blue and red versions by a dark, monolithic form, an allusion to the site’s archaeological past and its monumental carving in stone.

1 Fernando de Szyszlo, quoted in Álvaro Media, “Fernando de Szyszlo,” Art Nexus 11 (January-March 1994): 211. “Lurín es un desierto desolado y misterioso.”

This text was created in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and written by Patricia Ortega-Miranda.