Enrique Zapata Ponce on Bereniche Aguiar’s Art (English)

            Bereniche’s painting is color, and the color is a personal experience, a knowledge reserved for each one of us.  The qualities of color cannot be transferred, even those who specialized in its properties …. Whatever we know and whatever we may think about it can’t be materialized into a concrete idea.

            If color followed any rules, these it would accept and obey, and would be carried on with joy; this joyful characteristic of color is what makes the faculties of the imagination so infinite.

            The post-modernity of Contemporary Art has a dangerous tendency toward organized incoherence: If something is weird or odd—it must be Art.  This doesn’t apply to color which is in itself exuberant to the point of extravagance, and, this equation can’t be disputed because it lacks its opponent which cancels itself: beauty cannot be banal.

            I feel that Bereniche works her paintings within this joy, this chromatic happiness.  It is like a soul dancing in the fiery lights of a cathedral’s stained-glass windows.  She alone is the origin of the cause of this rainbow of color: the lively pyrotechnical result she wants to share with us.

            Color, light, and fire: to shine is to burn it’s because of this that the stars seem alive and Bereniche’s Art, made of light and color surges up from her own internal fiery nature.

            This explosive show of incandescence has what is genuine and invincible and belongs to all that is elemental, thrusting forth our lively imagination.  It is the ultimate paradigm of Art: radiant calligraphy full of indecipherable meanings.

            Apotheosis and catastrophe are events totally alien to color because they both owe their existence to their violent nature and from these processes, whole new worlds are born, all the quite meaningless to the myopic vision of our civilization.  Worlds in flames that give birth to a crystal-like Architecture, with those diamond flashes reflected in the walls and ornaments of palaces, exquisite as those that glitter in the Scherezaad wondrous tales of The Thousand and One Nights.

Enrique Zapata Ponce

Presidente de la Academia de Pintura Sociedad Mexicana de Geografia y Estadisticas.