Fulgencio Lazo’s exceptional talent has been evident from the beginning of his professional career. Ever aware of the need for experimentation and change, and always guided by his constant search for an authentic and personal voice, he has experienced notable transformations over the last three decades. These transformations involve shifts in media—moving from the use of oils to acrylics, combining his engraving and painting skills to produce “relief paintings” (for example Threading Together Family History included in this exhibition) and sculptures. Nonetheless, his style is firmly cemented bythe natural elegance of his lines and the recurring presence of certain motifs packed with personal and cultural symbolism, with both individual and collective references. Unique and clearly recognizable, these motifs have become Lazo’s personal signature.
Cultural and familial memories are essential thematic threads in Lazo’s paintings. Ancestral moments and spaces, both mythical and autobiographical, are continually summoned up by the artist in the stories he weaves with every stroke of his brush. Childhood experiences, the village of his birth, his maternal home are all aesthetically reconstructed by Lazo through the symbolic and stylized geometry he employs to synthesize familiar objects of his childhood experiences. Those elements, reduced to their most essential and allegorical properties, acquire an emblematic value. Triangular masks and faces are often representations of his family members, but also of a purely non-specific human identity. The candles are elemental light, symbols of spirituality, knowledge and primordial origins; the cubes and rectangles that enclose the lanterns (luminarias), the halos that encircle the candle flames, the checkered pattern of the carpets and other textiles are all converted into geometric designs. The circle embodies ideal nature and emerges here as an element for the salvaging of cultural memory. Likewise, the straight line, those fine strings stretched out across the canvas and often held by the stylized hands that proliferate in Lazo’s paintings, seem to measure the geographic and chronological distance between an intimate and harmonious childhood spent in the maternal home, and the artist’s current location.
The home, the village and the objects that populate them, establish a rhythm marked by the harmony between natural and human-made spaces and their inhabitants—and among the persons themselves.In most of Lazo’s works, objects appear exclusively in relation to the human value assigned to them. These things act as communicating vessels that establish a series of familial and social bonds among the persons that have played a part in the communal life the painter remembers, deeply respects and longs for. Indeed, most of the paintings included in this exhibition continue the storytelling that has energized Lazo’s work. Specifically, his childhood memories regarding his participation in the production of garments his mother and siblings engaged in to earn a living. As a child, he would assist by sewing buttons on shirts and performing other chores. For him, the teamwork involved in this home labor was an extension of the communal life and spirit of cooperation that has always defined Oaxacan, Zapotec culture. The very titles of the paintings evidence this thematic thread: Family Tree; Grandmother Weaver; Threading Together Family History; Community Embroidery.
Memory serves the artist to bridge his communal heritage with his present urban condition. Fulgencio Lazo’s genius lies in his amazing ability to maintain a harmonious tension between continuity and experimentation, between tradition and the modernity, between the abstract and the concrete.
– Lauro Flores, University of Washington, 2024
Lauro Flores is Professor of Chicano and Latin American literatures and cultures at the University of Washington, Seattle. His main teaching and research interests are in Latin American and Chicano/a literature and visual culture. Winner of a 2007 UW Distinguished Teaching Award, Dr. Flores has been visiting professor at Stanford University and UCLA. He was editor of the legendary journals The Americas Review and Metamorfosis: Northwest Chicano Magazine of Art and Literature, and has served on many editorial boards.
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