Leopoldo Cuspinera Madrigal

For more than 25 years, Leopoldo Cuspinera Madrigal (born 1971 in Mexico) has dedicated himself to the theme of landscape, its symbolic content and, its contemplation as a mirror of our soul and as a symbol of religious beliefs. Using handmade paper enriching it with pigments and metals, he creates archetypes of a nature in which the human being is sometimes present through his footprints but always as a witness.

In Cuspinera’s work, each tree stands for the tree of life. The abstraction of reality takes place through a reduction of colors to almost monochrome depictions. Oceans and forests are overlaid with clouds of fog that blur the contours of all topographical elements. Our vision is obscured. Foreground and background move closer together through these calculated effects. At the same time, the fog is a reminder of change and transience. Fog rises when the day awakens and also before darkness falls, as we know from the famous lullaby ‘Der Mond ist aufgegangen’ (‘The moon has risen’) based on the poem by Matthias Claudius (1740-1815). In staging this atmospheric phenomenon, Leopoldo Cuspinera Madrigal refers to the iconographic tradition of Romantic painters such as William Turner and Caspar David Friedrich.

Leopoldo Cuspinera Madrigal (b. 1971) studied architecture before supplementing his studies with liturgical art, monument conservation and musealisation. His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions in galleries, institutions and museums in Mexico, Europe and the USA.