RUX 32

While Manuel Rendón Seminario was born in Paris where his father was a diplomat, he was an Ecuadorian painter. He did live in the City of Light between the two world wars, however, playing an active role in the modernization of artistic languages underway there at the time. Though he was not a member of any surrealist group, his work from the Paris years seems to make use of automatism, a technique developed by surrealist artists to let the workings of the unconscious pour out onto the canvas. With its baffling and ghostly atmosphere, "RUX 32", which has been dated to 1927 (Rendón himself did not date his works), seems to partake of the surrealist spirit. No figure or space is formulated in this strange oil painting, just odd forms insinuated by the composition. Not only the objects scattered throughout the work—objects that are identifiable but confounding to reason—but also the title, written on the upper portion of the canvas, gives the work its dreamlike atmosphere. With RUX 32, Rendón Seminario became a pioneer in Latin American abstraction. Though he was one of the first to engage that tendency, he would not, after this work, return to it until well into the nineteen-forties.