Francisco Corzas

Francisco Corzas Chávez (October 4, 1936 - September 15, 1983) was a Mexican painter and printmaker, part of the Generación de la Ruptura.

However, he spent time creating drawings on the bathroom wall using pieces of coal, the first indication of his artistic talent.

He studied there from 1951 to 1955 under teachers such as Agustín Lazo, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Carlos Orozco Romero, María Izquierdo and Juan Soriano .

One of these endeavors was the formation of the group Trio La Esmeralda with Felipe Zaúl Peña and Raúl Anguiano, which performed at student parties.

[1] However, more importantly, his time in Europe allowed him to visit various museums to learn about and develop a passion for classic European art, which had great influence on his aesthetics.

[1] In Italy in 1967, Corzas met his future wife, Bianca Dall’Occa, a young widow eleven years his senior.

They met at a restaurant where Francisco was painting a mural and where Bianca sang and played the guitar in exchange for meals.

[4] He had fourteen individual exhibitions and participated in forty three in various countries of the world including Rome, Florence, Venice, Belgrade, Prague, Brussels, Vienna, New Delhi, Mumbai, Osaka, New York, San Antonio, Los Angeles, Montreal, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Santiago de Chile.

[3] In addition to those commissions, he also received one for ten lithographs for Lublin Press in New York as well as one from the Fundación Cultural Televisa to create a work called Agonías y otras ofrendas.

[3] In 1998, fifteen years after his death, there was a homage to the artist at the Centro Cultural San Ángel, with José Luis Cuevas, Rafael Coronel, Javier Juárez and Raymundo Sesma among others.

In Corzas case, a new kind of figurative expression that left much of the definition to the imagination, especially the background, giving the works an ethereal quality.

[2][5] Corzas’ strongest influence on his artistic development came from his time in Italy and his study of European movements from the Renaissance, to Baroque, to Mannerism and the more modern avant garde.

[3] His preferred themes included sensual and erotic female nudes, among the best being melancholic, sadly beautiful women among faded colors that suggest a bed or a shawl.

This gives the works a mysteriousness, accentuated by the play of light and shadow as well as the use of limited colors such as yellows, dark ochre and black.