Self-Portrait with Blue Shirt

Until recently, Emilio Baz was an artist unknown only to a few critics and the esteem of a priviliged group of collectors who valued his painting. He exhibited his work on a few ocassions and came to direct a renown gallery in the enchanting province of San Miguel de Allende, Guanjuato, for which he might very well be considered a painter who isolated himself from the artistic world, from which, nevertheless, he maintened close aesthetic ties. His first area of study was architecture, which complemented his isolated studies in art. This explains the meticulous finish his pictures have, worked with a technique of Flemish inspiration consisiting of applying dry oils with small strokes of a short brush. Baz Viaud gave great importance to the spatial structure of his pictures and thus stands out as a fine portrait painter with the restlessness of a metaphysical tone. He painted several self-portraits in which he left a record of his artistic aspirations and this one from the Blaisten Collection is from a time of young maturity, where the soft chromatics contain a virile expressive strenght seen in the image of a man looking at himself.