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In the fifties and sixties, a new generation of Mexican sculptural artists, came to the forefront. They were later known as the Rupture, because they rejected the didactic function of art, and above all, its stubborn nationalism, to make use of the current modalities, such as abstract expressionism, ne figurative art and Pop/Art. Without joining the Rupture, but sharing its combative spirit, the works of Varo and Carrington had their best period. Within the avant-garde environment, the Carrington exposition in 1960 and the posthumous Varo retrospective in 1964 at the Palace of Fine Arts, joined in a kind of boom of the expressions of Mexican art. Together with the conquests of Mexican abstractionism, the invasion of A Pop mentality, the chimeric images of the hippies and admiration for the theater of the absurd, the works of Varo and Carrington greatly influenced the adoptionof the idiom of fantasy in Mexico.
The Carrington retrospective exhibit in 1995-1996,(6) served as a stimulus for the artist to create large-scale bronze sculptures such as she had never before attempted. In these works her capacity for esthetic seduction by means of connotative intrigue reaffirms the original ritual-domestic intention of her work, shared with so many cultures that are distant in time and space, since they have the same need to represent the forces of the terrible unknown and the divine infinite. In her sculpture, the Egyptian cat with a Hindu cobra back, the European medieval votive oven as a spinal column of a Syrian patriarch, the Egyptian sphinx with a chac mool(7) between its paws, all masked, theatricalizing their dignity, synthesizing dissimilar sacred figurations, which also comprised the objective and reflexive objective of all of Leonora Carrington's paintings. Her sculpture, as well as her individual exhibit of paintings in 1997, demonstrate that from beginning to end, her true mystical profession has been an esthetic one, and that the rest has been an iconographic unfolding to reveal the fraud (dolos, origin of the word idol) or supposedly civilizing deceits.
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