Meet the emerging artist Tania Baca Alvarado (b. 1988, Mexico), who during the pandemic used her art to express imaginative landscapes that bring serenity and calmness to the viewer during a year most people around the world were forced into confinement and limited to nature. The artist has created her unique style that makes it easy to identify her work with her choice of bold and pastel color palette to depict a dream-like landscape. For example, Borde Brillante shows a yellow ground home to various trees in all shapes and sizes. Among the trees found in the landscape, there is one with a curvy magenta trunk and blue foliage that makes it look like ice cream melting off a cone on a hot summer day—another tree has a crown that resembles a ball of pink cotton candy with a red trunk. The gradient sky goes from a light yellow to a soft pink and finally to red which meets a red lake on the horizon. This visually stimulating painting is a product of Tania's imagination and experimentation with color, which creates a fantastic harmonious image.
The artist currently works and lives in Toluca, Mexico, and has a Bachelor's degree in Plastic Arts from the Autonomous University of Mexico State (UAEMex). Earlier this month, Tania participated in FAIN, Independent Art Fair (Feria de Arte Independiente) in Monterrey, Mexico, along with other emerging artists living in Mexico. FAIN is an art fair with Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Mexico City locations, pioneering emerging artists in the country and making art accessible to new art collectors. One of the requirements this year is that all artists will have at least one work of less than 5,000 pesos (around 250 USD) and none over 60,000 (about 3,000 USD) to encourage new art collectors. These prices are attractive and a great reason to explore Mexico and other emerging art markets for artists to invest in.
To get to more about Tania and her work, I invite you to read my interview with her. Enjoy!
Tell us about who you are and what you do. What’s your background?
I am Tania Baca Alvarado, a plastic artist dedicated to the production and commercialization of my work. Since I was little, I was inclined towards artistic creation. I loved to collect images of various artists and illustrators that I began to know through films, books, magazines, or some other material I came across while attending painting and drawing workshops mainly, later my taste became something more serious. I thought to dedicate my life to production, to study arts formally.
When did you first discover you wanted to be an artist?
When I learned that there was a Faculty of Arts in my city, at that moment I decided that I would dedicate myself to being an artist.
What does your work aim to say? What are the major themes you pursue in your artwork?
My artistic practice happens as a journey of pictorial moments, through the introspection of my own imaginaries that have developed over time in which people, objects, situations, or scenarios that accumulate in my memory are participants, they are detonators of images that evoke the unsuspected, the fantastic, and the volatile of the moment. On the other hand, my work explores formal relationships such as color and matter through painting, which are linked to the images that emerge and define themselves in characters, landscapes and affective settings, silent moments of light.
Can you talk about your art-creating process?
My process of creating a piece happens at any time. Something or someone crosses in front of my eyes and evokes a memory that is transformed into an image. It happens every time experiences are added, and my extensive aesthetic background processes them in colors and shapes.
What art movements have influenced your worldview and the way you create art?
It is difficult for me to identify with any movement and its ideals since they are usually closely linked to the events of their time, even so, I like to think of my work with a certain naive vision. I feel that the use of technique and color is extremely free, perhaps Fauvist for the use of strident colors that I use so much in my palettes.
As an artist living in Mexico, how would you describe the country’s contemporary art scene to someone who has never been there?
The art scene is currently extremely varied, which I think is good since it is nourished from many fields linked to art. The people in the art scene range from amateur artists, artists who studied in academies or workshops, philosophers, anthropologists, dancers, etc. All of these people joined the artistic endeavor because their ideas take on a better meaning through the creation of a piece. Artists experimenting with technology and those on the periphery of the works, museums, art fairs, biennials, residences, all this adds up and enriches this panorama.
If you could only have one piece of art in your life, what would it be and why?
Equestrienne by Marc Chagall, inevitably, I identify with his work in general. It is beautifully experiential, with his people, land, customs, and love; they are the primordial element from which the image embodied in his work arises, nostalgic and joyful to the time.
Follow Tania Baca Alvarado on Instagram @tania_bacalva