Juan Villoro
Vicente Rojo was seven years old when his mother had to sell the piano. His father, who belonged to the Communist Party, had gone into exile in Mexico after the Civil War, and it would take Vicente ten years to reach him. In 1939, a broken family’s poverty was condensed in the piano that emerged from a fifth-floor balcony. Rojo would remember the scene in this way: “Seventy years later, this child thinks that throughout his life his deepest desire, the root of his sleepless nights, always accompanied by papers and colored pencils in his hands, has been to recover that piano. “
Born in 1932, Rojo belonged to the last generation of left-handers whose hands were tied to force them to be right-handed. His first rebellion was to use the “sinister” hand. The lack of resources confined him to an artisan education at the School of Work, whose name he honored by turning the effort into a vocation.
He made up for a lonely childhood with film and literature. Jules Verne and Daniel Defoe stimulated his fantasy of surviving on a desert island. Although he reached early youth in Barcelona, he did not retain the liquid Catalan l’s, and his accent faded in Mexico. “That’s because he was timid, and in Spain, he spoke little,” he told me wryly.
In his adopted country, he admired everything – the light, the colors, the culture, the sense of freedom – except corn, which he associated with bitter postwar bread. At the age of 20, he was already an assistant to the designer Miguel Prieto under the vibrant orders of Fernando Benítez, who would be, for him, successively, “a father, a brother and a son.” When he exhibited for the first time, Benítez highlighted his “tender and lyrical temperament, sometimes torn and violent” and distinguished in his work “the dawn, the disagreement, the hope.”
This accurate appreciation accompanied him in his double record as a graphic designer and plastic artist. At Imprenta Madero, his picas worked overtime, creating a galaxy of covers, magazines, posters, and catalogs. My generation grew up surrounded by those unsigned signs. In Vicente’s 80 years, I wrote: “It is a disgrace that we cannot celebrate the inventor of the arrow, the comb or the scissors, such useful prodigies that they became every day […] When reviewing the second half of the Mexican twentieth century, it is difficult It’s hard to understand that a single person has given so many roles to beauty. “
As a painter, Rojo assumed abstraction without losing contact with nature that served as his model. He admired Mondrian’s grids and liked to remember that those almost metaphysical lines came from the apple trees the painter had seen. He did not conceive the abstract as a negation of the real but as his secret sketch. In his series on the letter T, Eloquently demonstrated that geometry is a form of passion.
When he climbed the pyramid of Cholula, he contemplated a horizon so vast that it allowed him to see two showers of rain that occurred in different places. In his series Mexico in the rain made the two showers of rain intertwine.
He founded editorial ERA, providing the middle lyrics (the others corresponded to Azorín and Espresate), where he converted the design and selection of texts into co-authorship. Monsivais claimed that he wrote in hopes that Rojo would organize his disorder in a book.
His love for cats led him to conceive a joyous Gatomaquia, with texts by José Emilio Pacheco, he made discs of combinatorial poetry with Octavio Paz, García Márquez asked him for the cover of One Hundred Years of Solitude, he gave a face to the newspaper La Jornada and with his partner, writer Barbara Jacobs, designed a new alphabet.
At 89 years old, he had not slowed down his work rhythm, as evidenced by his sculptural mural on one side of the Hotel de Cortés, his stained glass window in Monte de Piedad, and the Octavio Paz memorial that will be inaugurated in San Ildefonso.
With the left hand that fascist education tried to outlaw, Vicente decided to free him. Without raising his voice, he imposed his judgment on him. His series on volcanoes and pyramids reveal a temperament that he knows the explosion and subjects it to equilibrium. Fire in harmony.
Vicente Rojo acted with the simplicity of someone who does not know that he is a genius, which made him admirable twice.
There was nothing easier than loving him and nothing more difficult than imitating him. He was “the dawn, the disagreement, the hope.”
