Friday, July 27, 7pm
Centro Cultural Ignacio Ramírez, Hernádez Macías75
Free

2 Openings at Bellas Artes

Alejandro Rivera "Arquitectura de la virtud"

Yui Sakomoto "Animismo"

New Exhibits by Two Artists Open at Bellas Artes

By Viridiana Gutiérrez Tejeda

The Cultural Center “El Nigromante” of the National Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to invite you to the opening of its new art exhibitions next Friday, July 27 at 7pm.

It is vitally important for the cultural center to present the work of local, national, and international artists who enrich the cultural life of San Miguel de Allende. Therefore, to close the annual cycle of exhibitions that have been shown throughout the year, we will exhibit three artists who clearly demonstrate this diversity that characterizes our town.

Alejandro Rivera Leal, one of the most beloved artists in San Miguel, is presenting his exhibition The Architecture of Virtue, with a selection of 20 years of artistic work.

Rivera was born in Mexico City in 1974. Since he was 18 years old, he has lived in San Miguel. He participated in the drawing, painting, and engraving workshops at the Ignacio Ramírez Cultural Center “El Nigromante” between 1992 and 1993 and then continued to teach himself art as he continued his career.

The main purpose of his work is to interpret through images the creative processes of the human being. He incessantly works at transforming matter into object and object into art. He starts each painting based on traditional themes like mythology, religion, war, love, and eroticism. The exploration of these themes is a pretext to create a contemporary narrative that best expresses his concerns, anxieties, and passions. As the creation of the work progresses, the pictorial process generates objects from the past and the present that inhabit a metaphysical universe governed by imagination, memory, and the subconscious. The final objective is to create works with a particularly psychological and aesthetic theme, stimulating a dialogue between the observer and the work, a reflection on our corporeal and spiritual duality—the tangible and the imaginary, the individual and the collective.

The young Japanese artist Yui Sakamoto presents a suite of oil paintings created for his first ever public exhibition called “Animism.”

Sakamoto was born in Aichi Japan in 1982 and at the early age of five moved to the city of Nagasaki, where he was strongly impacted by the stories of the atomic bomb. With the influence of Japanese manga, he learned to draw comics and cartoons. His father was an art teacher who taught him many techniques that were perfected with his studies. At that time, he painted especially Pop Art with acrylics

Having traveled through Europe and visited the continent’s most important museums, the artist has integrated his auto-didactic studies in art history with a fascination for the world of Surrealism, and a passionate integration of Mexican mysticism and iconography.

He currently lives in San Miguel, where he also has a private studio, and is represented by the gallery Intersección Contemporary Art SMA.