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It is 1968 between global student conflicts and the upcoming Olympic Games in Mexico. The year began with an unusual snowfall in Mexico City, and ended with the pain of the student massacre in Tlatelolco and the joy of the Olympic games. I eas born in April, I was born, like so many others. Ignorant of everything happening around me and of the designs of the stars, politics, society, and geography. It was perhaps fate that eventually took me down a totally unexpected path.
Later on, amid my parents’ expectations of law school at rhe UNAM, engrossed with professor Burgoa’s lectures with my nose in a book by Ortega and Gasset, I turn 180 degrees and timidly line up to register in art school and taking the first step of the tortuous, fantastic, painful and wonderful path that is art.
I learnt to move beyond a school of priests or nuns, to not blush when painting a nude model. I understood the use of oil paint and the addictive habit of art. I observed the spaces between forms, studied perspective and fell in love with fantasric works of art. I was moved to tears looking at a painting, when time ceases to exist and the heart becomes a sore pulsating mass. When the friction of beauty is so deep that the heart – which has no pain receptors- makes you bend over in pain and cross your arms, trying to protect it from that blow. From that sigh that is a hurricane. And from that whisper that would never leave me…
54 years later, I’m still here. Having had shows in the 5 continents, studies in Italy, South Africa, Spain, and Mexico. I have taught, participated in biennials, studied and written. I live art as a spiritual practice; sometimes, I deviate from the path, but this is a path wide enough to believe that I am lost and narrow enough so that I am not.
The opposite of war is not peace. It’s creation.
Serioushka Hellmund 2021
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Serioshka Hellmund.
