Recognizable image s open the door to the unknown: to the imagination, to dreams, to mystery… so we are invited by Miguel Angel Jauregui’s I0I Poltronas. 

Faithful to the figurative tradition in which he began his career as a painter over three decades ago, with a minimum of elements—which are always the same, almost identical in  composition and composition—Jauregui reveals an inexhaustible universe in an extensive  series that takes its name from an element whose presence is never completely revealed, which  we almost always sense underneath the cloth that covers it: dresses, blankets, tapestries, sheets  that could be shrouds are draped over a chair, suggesting the form of a soft easy chair, large  and comfortable, created for rest, which could either be in the European style or be a Jaliscan  barrel chair. Sometimes, more commonly, we can make out simple but varied chairs that could  be humble or luxurious; at others, less commonly, we catch a glimpse of a Provençal chair or  the curved structure of a Thonet chair.  

If the chair is almost always invisible, that leads us to question, sense, imagine…the enigma —or curiosity?— grows with the spellbinding presence of the visible object that covers it. Dresses  that display the beautiful textiles representative of the diverse cultures of Mexico—which have rarely been represented by the country’s painters, but Jáuregui, who is cosmopolitan but before  all else Mexican, does it with the elegance they deserve—huipiles, ponchos and shawls in which  we recognize the monochrome birds and flowers of Mazatec embroidery, the explosion of  colorful flowers of Zapotec clothing, the geometric grid of the Isthmus, the Otomi worldview  captured in Tenango textiles, the Tzotzil chromaticism of Zinacantan…among many other motifs that appear on the skirts, but which largely contrast with the brilliant silks draped over the seat of the chair. And questions arise: What are they doing here? Are they waiting to be used  or have they been abandoned? Who are they for? Who is this who?

Nina Zambrano
Museo Marco's ExDirector

A lucid and consistent Manichaeism from an artist that, coming from the Sultan of the North, has arrived and transformed himself in a tumultuous art scene. From the apparently distant 1980s to the beginning of the 21st Century, he has said that “I’m resuming, I’m not  beginning, I have no expectations of that. Because I’m an honest painter, I’ve always done what  I desire. 

Alfonso Miranda Márquez 
Museo Soumaya’s Director

Miguel Angel Jauregui is an artist who has crossed its own paths ...along his thirty-five year career. And now it has concentrated during the past 12 years in a particular subject: the Poltronas. The choice has responded to personal searches and has been developing in different ways. Throughout his career, Jauregui has developed his own pictorial itinerary, crossing  several territories and feeding on various traditions. In the beginning, he xperimented with  watercolor and as testimony of this formative process left an extraordinary series of Mexican  scenes; Later, after his first stay in Paris, he watered sources of Surrealism: his work at that time  acquired depth and mystery. The technique reached a high degree of maturity. In the next stage,  called by him as “epistemological Art”, which also took place in Paris, intertextuality prevailed:  his work was a reinterpretation of the main pictorial traditions of the West; something similar  happened with the series of self-portraits that he began painting from 1984: the technique  worked here as a way of formal experimentation.

Victor Barrera Enderle

The mystical quest of Jauregui’s work is constant, albeit not always in plain sight. The alchemist labor of transmuting the soul is precisely that of finding the latter in the most  unexpected places. The world in its entirety is a temple in which to find our own divinity. In  the works that are here in question, the painter seems to have woven something that we may  perhaps be capable of bearing, taking us from its apparent surface to depths from which we  may emerge unscathed.

Sergio Pérez Torres