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Last updateThu, 24 Mar 2016 1pm

Contemporary art at MUSA

The University of Guadalajara’s graceful, two-story wedding cake, perhaps best known for the large, striking José Clemente Orozco mural in its auditorium, is throwing the spotlight on a pair of present-day artists so widely different in style and background that their only points in common, other than being men, could be their approximate age and the rough coincidence of their respective shows at the Museo de las Artes (MUSA).

I suspect that Maximino Javier, whose 38 large- and medium-format oils and watercolors fill salons on MUSA’s first floor, will be the favorite of most visitors. The show, entitled “De amor, colores y tierra” (Of love, colors and land) is a reflection of Javier’s home state, Oaxaca, known for its colorfulness and the striking beauty of the land. 

As for “love,” his subject matter is principally people, depicted playfully and occasionally grotesquely, and frequently in the act of kissing or other amorous activities.

On the other hand, François Dolmetsch’s 26 medium- and small-format photographs (which almost defy classification as photographs) are as inscrutable as the title of the show — “Palimpsestos tropicales.” Even the translation — tropical palimpsests — necessitated a visit to dictionary.com where I found that, besides signifying a very old document on which original text has been erased and overlaid with newer writing, a palimpsest is something having diverse layers apparent beneath the surface, which seems to fill the bill in the case of this show.

Dolmetsch is British but apparently has spent time in tropical areas including South America, where, we are told, he photographed peeling and decaying walls as he wandered through urban areas.

His images, if they can be called images, are so non-pictorial — containing only scraps of a number and a letter here and there, plus a lone porky pig in a hat — that for me they became almost completely abstract. I spent too much time peering at the images at close range, trying to figure out if they were photos of many, or just one, peeling wall with layers of decaying signs hanging from them. One or two were clearly images of a single wall, and I found I liked those best. Most were as chaotic as a Jackson Pollock painting, although, like Pollock, they have an underlying unity of color and texture.

“De amor, colores y tierra,” Maximino Javier paintings, show until May 15. “Palimpsestos tropicales,” François Dolmetsch photographs, shows until April 3. Museo de las Artes, Juárez 975, corner of Enrique Diaz de Leon, Guadalajara. Tel. (33) 3134 1664. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Mondays. No charge to enter.

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