by Victor López

We are women and men of the mountains, of the Sierra Madre and the echo of the wind that whispers the voice of the ancestors.

Our cosmo-vision guides us in each new sunrise, teaches us how to celebrate and honor the rain of Cocijo, the light of Xipe Totec and the corn of Pitao Cozobi.

Our Ancestral knowledge is a legacy that we still live, from our strength and our dignity, every day. Our legacy is not a fashion or trend.

Our legacy is beyond "folklore," a concept that mimics and generalizes all the different worldviews of our world.

Tradition is not a set of acts that await the recognition and sight of others.

The festivity of our people is from the heart and with a strong sense of commitment to our absent, to our dead, to our ancestors and ancestors present in our night mountains, walked and guarded by Coqui Bezelao.

We honor the Word, since it transmits our ancestral knowledge, to work our fields, in mountain ranges that are higher than the clouds.

We make furrows. We trace our life through the act of furrowing our sacred land. We draw from the field with the blessing of the heavens, with the good will of our Lord Cocijo.

As my grandfather once said, "After the furrow, the seed, a grain of corn, a grain of beans and a pumpkin seed, then wait for God to send us the water, send us the blessing to our land."

An act of faith and love, and suddenly; the cornfield and the corncob, the blessings have been given and the celebration comes with the pinch of corncob, because mother earth continues giving us the food, and the faith to continue drawing the fields with the furrows that our ancestors taught us to draw.

Stanley Hayter argued that the origins of humanity correlate with graphic art. He wrote that perhaps the trigger for men and women to begin to become spatio-temporally aware of their surroundings may have been the observation of the footprints that living beings left in their wake.

Hayter thought that prehistoric man, looking back and seeing the line of footprints that he himself left when passing over soft ground, could have drawn the conclusion that every action implied the passage of time and the existence of a movement; and, metaphorically, he compared the image of that trail of footprints with that of the grooves that an engraver leaves on a matrix as he carves it. It was a comparison that touched on the most basic essence of the act of engraving: the recording of pressure and movement on a surface.

The trace is a groove, a sign of ubiquity and a synonym of presence; it is the record of a historical action, it is the act of sowing.

From the craft of engraving, we honor our ancestors, each carving, each furrow generated by the edge of a gouge, is a tribute to those furrows traced in mountains, those that protect the seed to wait for the celebration of the harvest.

Let us celebrate this day, in which from the dignity and pride of knowing that we are from the countryside and the mountains, we present a shared vision, from the sacred duality that nevertheless are cojoined in the cob.

We make furrows, and today we share this, our harvest.

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Victor López was born in Oaxaca de Juárez, Oaxaca, on June 1, 1989, and studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Autonomous University of Querétaro.

In 2012 he was awarded with the "State Prize of Ecology" in the category of Mural on Canvas. Santiago de Querétaro Qro.

As a visual artist has presented his work individually at the Regional Museum of the State of Queretaro and the municipal gallery Rosario Sanchez de Lozada of the same state.

He has participated in more than 50 national and international group exhibitions presenting his work in countries such as Uruguay, Sweden, Estonia and the United States.

Selected in the 5th and 6th biennial of engraving Shinzaburo Takeda held in the city of Oaxaca and traveling exhibition in 5 states of the republic; Veracruz, Yucatan, Mexico City, Guanajuato, Durango and Texas USA.

Selected to participate in "Native Corn" exhibition convened by Mtro. Francisco Toledo in protest to the use of transgenic corn, held at the Centro de las Artes San Agustin, Oaxaca Oaxaca.

Selected in the XI National Biennial of painting and engraving Alfredo Zalce. With exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Alfredo Zalce in Morelia Michoacán.

In 2017 he was summoned by Nueve Arte Urbano to make a Mural in Tallin Estonia on the occasion of the centenary of the independence of this Baltic country.

Recently he was invited again by Nueve Arte Urbano to participate in Boundless Space" Exhibition and auction at Sothebys for the benefit of "Burning Man" in New York.

He is a founding member of the collective "La madriguera Gráfica" which proposes collective dialogue, as an artistic-social exercise, through experimentation with different graphic disciplines".

His work is part of important private collections, which has contributed to the continuous development of his work.

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