Until June 23, Guadalajara’s Museo de las Artes (MUSA) is hosting a large retrospective showcasing the creative mind of Rafael Cauduro, one of Mexico’s most recognized contemporary artists who combined social commentary, experimentation, juxtaposition, abstraction and eroticism with an immense technical mastery.
Cauduro (1950-2022) is perhaps best known for his mural “Seven Major Crimes, a Cry for Justice,” inaugurated in 2009 on the main staircase of Mexico’s Supreme Court in the capital. The work depicts crimes such as rape, abuse of authority and repression, as well as the accumulation of files over the years as citizens search in vain for justice. Cauduro maintained that the purpose of the mural was for ministers to always keep in mind the injustices that occur in Mexico.
Social and political criticism and the innovative use of materials were constant elements in Cauduro’s work over half a century. While the hidden messages —such as machismo, disability, poverty, marginalization, migration—can often be hard to decipher, one’s emotions are rarely left unstirred by the rawness of his themes. Cauduro frequently explores the passage of time and the deterioration of persons and things, placing his characters among cracked tiles, walls on the verge of collapse, rusty sewers, etcetera.
A self-taught artist who started his career as a cartoonist, Cauduro’s appetite for experimentation led him to utilize a huge range of materials in his artworks: sheet metal, wood, metal, fiberglass, thermoplastic polymers, epoxy resins, lacquers, textile binders and many different types of paper. His multiple art forms range from small to large format, and include caricatures, drawings, sculptures, glycées, glass and murals (many of which can be seen at different locations in the capital). While his styles have bobbed around from figurativism to pop-art, abstractionism and geometricism, his social commitment always remained firm.
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