Vicente Rojo Almazán

Biography

In 1949 a boy arrived in Mexico without a passport. Vicente Rojo was seventeen and had not seen his father since the end of the Spanish Civil War. His sister remained in Franco’s Spain for the rest of her life.

He was born in Barcelona on 15 March 1932, the youngest of four children. His father, Francisco Rojo, an engineer, a Communist and a Republican, went to France after the defeat of the Republic and then obtained political asylum in Mexico: President Lázaro Cárdenas admitted Spanish refugees. He sent for the family in stages. In 1947 the two older children came, in 1949 his mother, Teresa, and Vicente. The artist’s uncle, General Vicente Rojo Lluch, commanded the Republic’s forces fighting against Franco’s military uprising. In Barcelona in 1946 the boy had managed to study drawing, ceramics and sculpture briefly at the Escuela Elemental del Trabajo.

In Mexico he began not with painting but with typography. His superior in the publishing department of the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA) was Miguel Prieto, also a Spanish émigré, and from him Rojo learned lettering and design. On Prieto’s advice and with his support he enrolled at the school “La Esmeralda”, where his teachers were Agustín Lazo and Raúl Anguiano. After six months he left: the school reminded him of the one that had frightened him in Barcelona. Rojo recalled that he then began to paint in the private studio of another Spanish émigré, Arturo Souto, and learned mostly through conversations with him.

From 1958 he exhibited in Mexico and abroad. His first show included figurative pieces, but, in his words, what interested him in them was something else: he had managed to join texture, the geometrization of forms and colour. He abandoned the figure, made the geometry softer and the colour subtler. Among his early abstract works “Geometries” stands out, with almost no paint, using pieces of rubber and rubber balls instead. Rojo belonged to the so-called Generation of the Rupture (Generación de la Ruptura), Mexican artists who moved away from the official school of the muralists. He worked in series. The first, “Signals”, dates from 1964–1965. In 1970 he began “Negations”, one of his best-known series, built around the letter T.

Alongside this ran his editorial work, which in volume perhaps matched his painting. In 1953 he became one of the founders of the magazine “Artes de México”, its art director and the designer of its logo; the magazine ran until 1963. From 1956 to 1961 he was art director, and later also editor, of the supplement “México en la Cultura” to the newspaper “Novedades”, which was run by Fernando Benítez. Then came the supplement “La cultura en México” to the magazine “Siempre!”, the “Revista de la Universidad de México”, the “Gaceta del Fondo de Cultura Económica”, “Nuevo Cine” and “Diálogos”. In 1971, with the Argentine-Japanese artist Kazuya Sakai, he designed the magazine “Plural”. He also devised the layout of the newspaper “La Jornada”.

In 1960, together with José Azorín and the brothers Neus, Jordi and Quico Espresate, Rojo founded the publishing house Era and became its art director. For it and for other publishers he made covers that readers across Latin America remembered, among them the first edition of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (Buenos Aires, 1967). In 2018 Rojo himself estimated his tally at about 700 covers for Era and about 200 for other publishers.

In 1965 the actor and film director Alfonso Arau invited Rojo and the artist José Luis Cuevas, also of the Generation of the Rupture, to create the image of a satirical rock band, Los Tepetlates. The songs’ lyrics were written by Carlos Monsiváis. The project was short-lived; the band’s only album, with works by Rojo and Cuevas, became a collector’s item.

In 1991 he received the National Prize for Arts in the fine arts category, and in 1992 the international association Icograda awarded him its prize for excellence in graphic design. On 16 November 1994 he was elected to El Colegio Nacional, the Mexican academy of leading scholars and artists; his inaugural lecture was called “Shared Dreams”. In 1998 the National Autonomous University of Mexico conferred an honorary doctorate on him.

Later Rojo also made works for the public space of Mexico City: the fountain “País de Volcanes” in Plaza Juárez (2003), the sculpture “Pérgola Ixca Cienfuegos”, in memory of Carlos Fuentes, in the Polanco district (2008), the stained-glass window “Versión celeste” in the inner courtyard of the Nacional Monte de Piedad (2019) and the mural “Jardín Urbano” on the façade of the Museo Kaluz (2019).

He died on 17 March 2021 in Houston. His daughter, Alba Rojo Cama (1961–2016), also became an artist and is known for her mathematical sculptures.