Emilio Payán: Between air and paradise

C

Armen Parra was born in a volcanic environment in Chimalistac, formerly known as Oxtopulco, near the current National Autonomous University of Mexico. This once agricultural area slowly transformed into a city. The Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl volcanoes were her daily landscape, forging her identity and connection to the land. She considers herself a daughter of volcanoes; her environment shaped her life and creativity.

His father, Manuel, known as El Caco Parra , was a visionary artist and architect. He found valuable material in demolitions for an innovative construction system and created puzzles of stone and time. What others considered demolition waste, he transformed into homes. His legacy remains in every reused stone.

From birth, Carmen Parra was immersed in the life of art. The fretworks of Best Maugard were her visual alphabet, and open-air schools, her classroom. As a child, she was surrounded by creators like Germán Cueto, who gave her drawing classes and was related to her mother, María del Carmen Rodríguez Peña, known as Mane , a melancholic woman educated in the old-fashioned way who owned a folk art business in the Saturday Bazaar. At 6 years old, El Caco Parra took her to the Cabañas Hospice in Guadalajara to see José Clemente Orozco paint the mural Man on Fire . Art was her inevitable destiny; her path intertwined with that of artists, and at that intersection, she found her true essence.

She began her artistic training at the National Preparatory School No. 5 of the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico), where she studied with Héctor Azar, who founded the university theater. She then continued her studies at the National School of Anthropology and History, then located on Moneda Street in the Historic Center. At 15, Parra joined the Mexican Communist Party and formed a clandestine cell with Carlos Payán and Raúl Kampfer, an antique dealer and patron of the arts, who owned a gallery in the Zona Rosa where party meetings were held. At the time, they believed they could change history.

Caco Parra forged discipline and rebellion in Carmen. He was a chisel that carved her character and launched her into the world with a shove, turning her into an artist who managed to be herself. He took her to all the pyramids, all the markets, all the towns and all the convents of the 16th century, sowing in her a profound connection with the history of national culture. Her father's anarchist character gave her strength and drove her to continue searching for what she calls paradise , which she perhaps found on the shores of the Pacific.

Carmen, an artist and pictorial anthropologist, was fortunate enough to live in the Mexico of Spanish and other refugees, especially intellectuals and artists who transformed the country's history and culture. Carmen Parra shared this life with her sister Luisa Riley, a documentary filmmaker and beloved companion. Parra believes that we are children of our parents' passions and that we are educated as a product of those same passions .

The artist has formed various organizations to rescue Mexico's historical and natural heritage, such as the Historic Center of Oaxaca, Hidalgo, and Puebla. Although some projects failed to materialize, others did, such as the one dedicated to the golden eagle, which led to the creation of a breeding center in Teotihuacan, where a sanctuary for these majestic birds exists. She has also worked for 45 years on the conservation of the monarch butterfly.

Carmen Parra and her son, Emiliano Gironella, founded El Aire Centro de Arte in 1997 with the goal of creating social and artistic projects and defending creative freedom, generating their own language in this contemporary whirlwind. The gallery houses the library Esto es Gallo, by painter Alberto Gironella, as well as an archive containing a significant collection of photographs.

Carmen Parra paints with the form of the soul; in her dreamlike universe, the angels and archangels of New Spain coexist with butterflies and flowers. Her art is a flight between past and present, where each brushstroke is a heartbeat of the nation reflected in her work.