Review | Photographic Anthology: "Nature and Abstraction" by Miguel Ángel Antúnez
- Ma. del Rosario Zamudio Zavala
- Jun 6, 2025
- 4 min read
The photographic anthology by Miguel Ángel Antúnez, exhibited at the “La Sirena” Gallery, brings together 52 photographs curated around two thematic axes: nature and abstraction. These give rise to a brilliant display of black and white images, captured with 35mm cameras, developed using traditional darkroom techniques, and printed with carbon inks on cotton paper. The works were created by this remarkable photographer during his travels through the geography of the vast, diverse, robust, lyrical, and whimsical Mexican landscape.
In this critical narrative, I begin by referencing a quote from the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, a prominent figure of the Frankfurt School, taken from his work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in which he states: “Technification is not a fetish of collapse but a key to happiness” (Benjamin, 2001: 58). Why do I emphasize this quote? Because of the great technological discovery that the advent of the camera represented at the end of the 19th century—a time when art faced the challenge of industry and mass reproduction, forecasting its own demise. Art would no longer be unique and unrepeatable but subject to reproduction. It was thanks to this quality that images became accessible to the broader social masses of the modern and contemporary world. The art of photography democratized the image when it had long been bound by officialdom and academicism.
In painting, the brush would be replaced by the shutter. So where does the sublime act of a sunrise painted on a painter’s easel stand, compared to a sunrise captured by a photographer? Is a sublime or emotional act determined by the hand that paints or by the eye that sees only through a lens? Could it be that both possess the genius to abstract beauty by engaging their senses and then translating them onto canvas or paper?
Today, we recognize that both artists and photographers carry a distinct and sensitive perception of the world around them. Their works are full of meaning and symbolism; they see the invisible and reconfigure reality, offering new and expansive perspectives to a world that watches and waits.
In this way, the photographic artist has managed to capture the moment—a fact, a landscape, a thing—elevating their technical capacity and perceptive sensitivity to achieve true aesthetic phenomena, establishing photography as a major discipline that universalizes and strengthens the Visual Fine Arts. The current exhibition is a clear example of this.
Miguel Ángel Antúnez, heir to that great technical revolution, invites us into his optical language, one that reconfigures the spectral natural world—of that tree that wants to be beast, that dances and twists in the throes of catharsis. In each of his works, Miguel Ángel is the lens that astonishes us and jolts our imagination.
Antúnez’s aesthetic proposal—capturing with the eyes of the spirit the textures of tree bark, plasticity, arboreal architecture, the drawn lines of roots, the mimesis between leafy trees and cloud shapes, the spectral cohabitation of trunks clinging to stone, and countless abstract and figurative representations—introduces something new in each of his visual productions. His photographic technique involves a transfiguration that breaks through the contemplative to reach an emotional state.
The power of his work lies in its communicative capacity, the continuity of meaning that follows the impulse to convey a message—one that reveals the moment of communion with the natural world; the gesture of directing a discourse, a secret complicity with the addressed subjects: the tree, the stone, the clouds, the water, the vestiges—all in black and white to deepen a sense of rootedness, of the earthly, of the eternal. At the same time, Miguel Ángel does not deny—nor conceal—the complicity between damage and the ravages of time, which he captures and which exists between himself and his bestiary—man and nature. This is his ritual function, which ties him to his spectral body of images: doing justice to what has been discarded by removing it from the context that defines it as overlooked or useless, and placing it into another context that updates its unrealized potential to show its irreducible difference.
Miguel Ángel Antúnez Baza began his professional career as a scientific researcher in arboriculture at the National Commission of Fruit Growing, during which time he started traveling through the Mexican countryside to document and classify different types of trees, which imperceptibly began to influence him. His artistic inclinations later led him to explore other areas of the arts, such as architecture, abstract art, and portraiture—curiosities born from a childhood rich in observation and dialogue with his grandmother, Carmen Carrillo de Antúnez, a sculptor and anthropologist. She left a lasting legacy in Mexican art and culture through her beautiful models that depict and interpret the ancient “Market of Tlatelolco” from the Mexica culture and the model of the “Mammoth Hunt” from Mexico’s prehistoric period, both of which are now housed in the ethnographic halls of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Both works were created using wax modeling techniques.
Miguel Ángel Antúnez has exhibited his work both individually and collectively in private galleries and university cultural centers throughout Mexico and Central America.
Notably, he participated in the exhibition The Myth of the Volcanoes, where he was selected for his piece The Popocatépetl Volcano. The show included major figures of contemporary Mexican art such as Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl), Roberto Montenegro, Joaquín Clausell, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
His work has appeared in specialized publications both in Mexico and abroad, including Arbórea magazine from the Metropolitan University of Mexico City, Amigos de Bellas Artes, Black and White, among others.
His photographs have also been used as book covers for literary works published by Mexican and Spanish publishing houses.
Visit the exhibition through October 5 at the “La Sirena” Gallery. By appointment: 452 108 9840.
Ma. del Rosario Zamudio Zavala holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Art History from the Universidad de Morelia. She has worked at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in the Michoacán Delegation, at the Popular School of Fine Arts of UMSNH, and served as cultural advisor for the Secretariat of Outreach and University Extension at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo (2002–2004). She has also worked on research projects and participated in various exhibitions, contributing to their curatorial work.
Comments