DRAWING AND PRINTS


 
Whether he works in pencil, ink, or lithography, Vlady is a virtuoso of the pure form. In the sketchbooks he takes everywhere with him, his drawings capture daily life. Each of his lithographs is mesmerizing.

From his youth, when he travelled throughout Mexico getting to know his new homeland, Vlady has retained the habit of carrying a sketchbook in which he may draw a familiar shadow, a portrait of a friend, a childhood memory, or a monster straight out of his imagination. Vlady's sketchbooks have become famous in Mexico.


 
In 1985, the press at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) published a selection of almost 70 of Vlady's sketches, titled Los Cuadernos de Vlady. In 1996, UNAM and Siglo XXI co-published a hundred more drawings, accompanied by Vlady's thoughts, notes, and other aphorisms, in Abrir los ojos par soñar.


 
Vlady's sketchbooks take us deep into the place where his unique art, a synthesis of Renaissance and modernity, is born. We follow him in his search to perfect the technique of the Venetian great masters -- Titian, Tintoretto, Caravaggio. Vlady is a meteorite who emerged from the Renaissance and plunged, incandescent, into the historical passion of the twentieth century.


 
Eroticism is one of Vlady's major sources of inspiration. Two forms dominate his erotic rhythms: drawings trembling with modesty and delicacy made with lines as fragile as a finger's tracings on the sand; and convulsive forms, perturbing volumes, dark stains, and whites that are more vertigo than clarity.