SELECTION FROM THE MEXICAN POSTER BIENNALE
The work of Juan Rulfo (1917-1986) is breath and word, silence and image, music and emptiness. From photography to writing, from narrative to film script, Rulfo’s artistic creation is one of the most influential in Mexico in the world. His literature enjoys wide recognition and has been translated into several languages. It is a brief, but thorough and profound work, made up of three books that never cease to fascinate and/or surprise specialized critics and their readers in general.
The book El llano en llamas (1953) brings together 17 stories narrated with exemplary mastery, in which men, women and children from the Mexican rural scene face a desolate and fateful world, determined by isolation and poverty. This book is followed by his novel Pedro Páramo (1955), one of the most important of all time. In it, its author creates Comala, his own universe located “on the coals of the earth, in the very mouth of Hell”, a magical and terrible place narrated from death and memory. El Gallo de oro (1980), a novel that was made into a film before being published as a book, recreates a world of galleries and palenques in which luck and destiny are fought.
One hundred years after the birth of Juan Rulfo, the International Poster Biennial in Mexico A.C. presents Tell them not to kill me!, a graphic history of Rulfo’s most outstanding works, told and performed by Mexican poster artists. It is necessary to remember that Rulfo’s work has marked our culture, that his aesthetic proposal is current, that his art is universal; that is to say, that beyond nations and languages, Rulfo’s work dialogues with the human.
Fidel Carlon Solis
