Francisco Toledo (Mexican b. 1940)

Known for his brilliant use of various techniques and unusual materials, Francisco Toledo references both nature and history in his remarkable artistic production; Toledo is recognized as a gifted painter, superb draftsman, sophisticated potter, and inventive printer. Toledo was born in a land of magic and myth--Oaxaca, Mexico--a place where legends and ancient stories are part of everyday life. Thus endowed, the land is a place of inspiration and spiritual nourishment; a setting for the unfolding of reality and fantasy simultaneously. The artist who has often invented terrains, figures, animals that are humanistic and bestial too, and renders beauty as savage and primordial, has framed an important body of work within the context of this mythical place.

Toledo casts insects, such as spiders, scorpions but also rabbits, monkeys and birds in impossible narratives, but always as characters connected to life, love, death, happiness--the eternal. His insects become protagonists in weird but wonderfully elaborate compositions; they interact with humans and sometimes, they assume quasi-human forms--the body of a nude woman with the glorious head of a bat or become a combination of features within humanoid characters that appear to fit perfectly in this imagined Toledan world.