On November 14, 2000, the evening before Leonora Carrington was to be honored as an "Officer of the Order of the British Empire," the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Art organized two round tables on the life and work of this English artist and writer, who has lived in Mexico since 1942. At the first round table the following presentation was given by art critic Luis Carlos Emerich, curator of the first retrospective of Carrington's paintings for the Monterrey Museum of Contemporary Art (1994) and co-curator of her second retrospective for the Tokyo Shinbun at the Tokyo Station Gallery in Tokyo, Japan (1997):

Leonora Carrington, Apart from and Belonging to Mexico By Luis Carlos Emerich

In a recent interview Leonora Carrington stated that, "arriving in Mexico was like arriving on another planet,"(1) and she still remembers her initial feeling of strangeness. However, it would seem that this "extremely mysterious country," which she entered in 1942 by way of the highway that crosses the United States border, was hospitable enough, or at least inoffensive, compared to Europe at that time, for her to continue living there and exploring her own continent of reason, creation and madness, expressed in her paintings, as well as her sculpture, narrative and theater.

Except for occasional absences from Mexico, caused by anguish (that "wind that runs through one's being"), Carrington has done her most important work in Mexico, although it is almost totally lacking in references to the environment or idiosyncracies of our country. Even in her mural painting, The Magical World of the Mayas (1965-1966), commissioned especially for the Museum of Anthropology and History to illustrate the mythological sources of the ancestral culture of southeastern Mexico, Carrington assimilated the physical, historic, religious and mythological references specific to that region and combined them according to her interpretation of the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of Mayan culture, as local transpositions and recombinations of her postulate of the ancestral world of the fantastic as a basis for knowledge. Despite the thematic specificity of this mural, her presentation is subjective. The chosen iconography is transformed into universal archetypes, which, in a subtle net of connections, link the individual psyche with the forces that act on the exterior world. Based on ritual imagery that embodies the fears common to all civilizations, its Mexican character derives only from its local peculiarities.

During the 55 years she has lived in this country, Mexico has perhaps represented for Carrington a distancing from the orthodox surrealism of her roots, as a way to achieve independence in her personal artistic style. This distancing may have been prolonged because she lived in a "stubborn land" from which she continued written or personal contact with her friends, such as Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Luis Buñuel, Edward James, Aldous Huxley, and Remedios Varo, among others, who gave her emotional, artistic and intellectual support. Thus, rather than devoting herself to developing the dogma of surrealism, she could delve into the transfigurations of memory. For this she drew on experiences of her childhood in England, early youth in France, her flight to Spain (where she was interned in a sanitarium for the mentally ill in Santander), and her acquaintance in New York in 1941-1942 with the European surrealists, expatriates like herself because of the war, creators of the so-called New York Surrealism. This transient and fragmented life prior to her arrival in Mexico would become the principal theme of her artistic production for more than a decade. It was enriched as she matured through her reading and experiences to extend to deeper and broader levels.

For all these reasons and more, Artes 110, the first picture painted by Carrington in Mexico City in 1942, seems to testify that existence is an unpredictable and uncontrollable flight from reason that gives rise to the monster of normality. The title of Artes 110 would seem to be one of those clues, if the painting did not refer to the domicile Carrington established in Mexico City together with the poet and diplomat, Renato Leduc, whom she married in 1941 in Lisbon. Thanks to this marriage she was able to leave Europe. She lived with him for a year in New York, and both with him and without him she was in contact with Mexican artists and intellectuals. In 1946 she divorced him in order to marry the Hungarian photographer, Emerico (Chiki) Weisz, whom she had met in 1943. Like all of Carrington's work, Artes 110 is a metaphor for a series of actual personal events confronted and interpreted ambiguously through their possible mythical relationships. It is (or is not) a log of her autobiographical journey from the present to a remote symbolic past, still related and active. The interpretation of a current contingency as a myth that articulates the guiding powers of life, for example, or the symbolic figuration to be read as a display of Tarot card arcanes would be one of the constants of all of Carrington's paintings.