Intimate scenes, starring local townspeople, were a recurring theme in Rufino Tamayo's drawings. By 1940, the year this work was made, the artist was living in New York full-time but spending summers in Mexico. Perhaps this drawing, with a clear popular and endearing orientation, had its genesis in Oaxaca, the place where Tamayo was born and where he spent these summers, seeking to contact his roots and then recreate that real and intimate universe in his painting.
The scene is simple, but it has a masterful summary of movement, which animates these images that refer to the most basic of intimacy. There are notebooks of drawings — filled with sketches and annotations — that the artist made in the markets of Oaxaca and due to the nature of the scene, which is almost cinematic, this meeting could have taken place in one of those said markets.
The trajectory of the line is infallible and transmits with a single gesture of the hand, the girls' experiences, but perhaps it is the dog's foreshortening that is best resolved. Poetic rather than documentary, the economy of forms becomes eloquent, it is like the equivalent of a short poem, made with few words. Drawn on conventional school notebook paper, Tamayo has captured an episode of latent life, an inconsequential scene, yet saturated with tenderness and emotion. A few lines of colored pencil in blue serve to imbue this scene with life and with a simplicity that nevertheless turns into a profound experience.
Juan Carlos Pereda, Museo Tamayo
Art is a means of expression that must be understood by everybody, everywhere. It grows out of the earth, the textures of our lives, and our experience.
Rufino Tamayo
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