Gravura Brasileira

FELIPE EHRENBERG

by Jorge Alberto Manrique

Excerpt from the book Arte y artistas mexicanos del Siglo XX
(Art and Artists from Mexico in the 20th Century)- by Jorge Alberto Manrique;
in the collection Lecturas Mexicanas - Fourth serie.
Ed. Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes - Mexico 2000
ISNB 970-18-5178-1
Page 51

An artist for whom more than anyone else, life and art are inextricably entwined, so much so that they become a sole indivisible unit. His life work as an artist is a result and at the same time, a part of his work as a person. And it is thus, by free will and conscious decisiveness, that it relates to his conception of what art is and his idea of what human activity is.

As varied as his activities are numerous, as constant as they are inventive, his sense of renovation and search are as a consequence, what characterize his life and his production. So is his rebelliousness as first manifested when he first left home, barely fourteen years old.
A seller of traditional crafts and producer of neo-crafts, draughtsman, writer, editor, graphic designer, muralist, group organizer, sculptor, unredeemable traveller, performance artist… his life’s work has been a launching pad for proposals, disperse to be sure, but consistent with his conviction that the artistic is not a specialized task -seen by him as a limitation-, rather as a profound manifestation of life.

This includes an ideological and political stand, to be understood not as a party liner but as a commitment to the problems that arise form the circumstances, and from what people face.
Such varied tasks, this vision of art, do not hinder Ehrenberg from considering himself a professional artist. His sense of integration, of art and life, of morals and activism, do not diminish the rigor of his practice. If his works (often extravagant, surprising and even subversive) are not to be seen in galleries and museums as much as they should be, it is not because they do not fit such places, but because of his personal contempt for the way art is distributed.

Ehrenberg’s generation, next to the previous one, that of Felguérez, Rojo, Sakai, was a most visible force in the Salón Independiente, founded in 1968. But the former were much more radical and went beyond a mere rejection of what to them was oficialdom’s unacceptable summons or a critique of government’s rigid control of the arts. What he -and others- underscored was their contempt of the institutional and private establishment’s concept of how art is produced and distributed, of the idea of the art object as something unique and marvelous, and the artist as an exceptional being. That is why shortly after, he was among the artists who terminated the Independent Salon: it did not serve their purposes. He thus became a sort of guerrilla force against the unique object and individualism.

From this distrust of the art object as a fetish and the artist as a saint, there arose -in the 70s in Mexico- the Group Movement. In London (one of his longest residencies abroad) Ehrenberg co-founded the Polygonal Workshop (1971). In Mexico he organized the Grupo Proceso Pentagono (1973). The GPP’s activities and those of other groups sought to modify the traditional art object and its substitution by something more efficient, and to annihilate artists’ individualism. This led to all manners of conceptual art and the implementing of alternative art techniques. It must be said that if any individual stands out among the groups (so anti-individualistic) that one is Ehrenberg, the great stimulator.

It is difficult to encompass Ehrenberg’s varied oeuvre, and it is never valid to separate it from the theoretical and ideological context in which it is produced. One the one hand, he is a refined draughtsman, of incisive intentions; creator of experimental graphic works; defender of alternative methods such as mimeography (which he termed neo-graphics); the cut-up and collage artist of absolutely banal, drably quotidian, and at the same time unexpected images; the stencil artist (applied to produce multiples as well as to create visual signs)… Always the unmanageable, the experimenter, the innovator.