Pedro Bonnin

I was born in 1967 in Cuernavaca, the city of eternal spring, as people call it, 50 minutes south of Mexico City. Cuernavaca used to be a beautiful town. The American collector Robert Brady lived in Cuernavaca during the 1960s and had the most wonderful house, which is now a museum full of paintings and fabulous objects from all around the world. Peggy Guggenheim visited him often, and so did Josephine Baker, who was among Brady’s most notorious friends. On a regular day, you can find me having coffee on the museum’s patio. You wouldn’t believe the trees hanging from the very old house’s red façade. Both the architecture and the vegetation are unique.
I studied philosophy, so when I’m not painting, I spend most of my time reading impossible books about phenomenology, ethics, ontology, aesthetics, and so on. Of course, I’m not always that mean to myself. I like literature and poetry as well. A couple of weeks ago, I finished “The Rings of Saturn” by W.G. Sebald, which is one of the saddest, most sublimely beautiful books I’ve read in a long time. It made it to my all-time Top Ten fiction list alongside Yasunari Kawabata’s “The House of Sleeping Beauty” and Varlam Shalamov’s “Tales from Kolyma.”.
In 1989, I traveled to Europe for the first time. I visited every single museum I could and every single gallery opening too (free wine is always welcomed when you are a poor traveler, and I had the perfect alibi since I had a legitimate interest in art). I went to Italy, and there I was mesmerized by the works of Giotto and the Italian masters of the Quattrocento like Simone Martini, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Duccio di Buoninsegna, to name a few. They opened my eyes. I suddenly realized that, up until that point in my life, I’d been living in a world of shadows. I’ve been an inhabitant of Plato’s cave, and finally, I was beginning to see the light. After several months of backpacking and sleeping in train stations, I went to Spain, visited Mallorca, where my grandfather was born, and decided to stay in Barcelona, where I found a job and started to paint. In 1991, I showed my paintings for the first time in Mexico City, and in 1993, I had my first one-man show.