The Home-Made Surgery

The subjects dealt with the muralists, the aesthetic privileges of the Open Air Schools of Painting and even the strong personality of some of the painters, impeded some artists - such as Julio Castellanos - from developing their own autonomy. His early work is characterized by the style imposed on him by one of his teachers, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, and by the memory of the work of another of his mentor's students, the young Abraham Angel, who died in 1924. This is why it was not until the end of the decade when Julio Castellanos could etch out his own pictorial language, founded in the structuring of a drawing style with classic references, composed spaces with metaphysical atmospheres and a soft toned palette. Few more than fifty of his paintings are known, as well as the drawings for a mural project under the title "children's games" painted around 1933, in the primary school Héroes de Churubusco in Coyoacan, whose technique and style are similar to this transportable mural, where the occasion is less festive but equally intimate and tender.