Pedro Friedeberg — simetrías y puntos de fuga — 70 años de creación: Curated by Michel Blancsubé
It is standard practice to bracket Pedro Friedeberg’s oeuvre with Surrealism, vigorously
extant in Mexico well beyond the European beginnings interrupted by the Second World
War. One wonders, in fact, if this country wasn't surreal even before Europeans dreamed or
even suspected the possibility of anything surreal.
Let's move on to the words and hands that definitely occupy a special place in the exuberant
universe of Pietro Enrico Hoffman Landsberg called Pedro Friedeberg shortly after his arrival
in Mexico in 1939. That Friedeberg means "mountain of peace" in German is in itself, more
than ever, no small matter. This immediately brings to mind, unless it's just a whim on my
part, Thomas Mann's famous Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924), even if the idea of
magic is not necessarily peaceful—quite the contrary, in fact. My intuition was to be
confirmed by the discovery of the transcription of a passage from chapter six of Mann's novel
in Friedeberg's book Aterbil/Ogolatac II, published in 2022. Talking of hands, in addition to
the famous Silla-Mano (Hand Chair) invented in 1961, the artist brings limitless quantities
of hands and feet to embellishing his sculptures and stabilizing his chairs, tables and furniture
of all kinds, not to mention the countless other others that tirelessly enrich his paintings and
drawings.
To describe Friedeberg as prolific is an understatement: his graphics multiply like those fish
in another story. His work is the unbridled expression of the excesses of a totally uninhibited
free spirit who ravenously, pleasurably and exultantly embraces everything that comes into
his head, and does so with erudition, application, determination—and talent.
It is not uncommon to find writings slotted into his compositions, or even vast surfaces
saturated with texts borrowed from writers of all stripes and epochs, as in the case of Sopa
de letras y letras de sopas (2023). Erudition is one of Friedeberg's cardinal values, lending
an encyclopedic dimension to his graphic work, whose style is also deeply indebted to his
training as an architect. Some of his architectural compositions share the structural aesthetics
of video games. What Friedeberg continues to bring off manually, armed with ruler and
compass, is what a younger generation of creators is accomplishing on computers to build
virtual theaters of often bellicose scenarios. This comparison is a golden opportunity to point
up the timelessness of Friedeberg's drawings, which take us back to bygone graphic
treatments, as well as to the imaginings of today's digital virtuosos. Like Filippo Brunelleschi
(1377–1446), Friedeberg was born in Florence, but to see his fondness for vanishing points
as stemming from this shared birthplace is a trifle facile, not to say preposterous. Even so,
most of his compositions are constructed according to the geometric laws of perspective
invented by his illustrious fifteenth-century predecessor: vanishing points and axes of
symmetry are the tools that systematize the pictorial space into which the artist beckons our
imagination to venture.
— Michel Blancsubé
