“JOSE DOLORES AGUILERA
A LIGHT THAT WON’T FADE AWAY. ”

Few people in the journalists sphere can boast about having known and shared, so much and so deeply, with one of the greatest masters of Mexican painting as I did.

When I learned about Master Aguilera painted work’s presentation, the first thing that came to my mind was that at long last, demanding audiences were going to enjoy such a beautiful and vital art, performed with a technique that catches the audience member because of its great attention to detail and refinement. Master Aguilera’s strokes were always refined and oriented to emphasizing a discipline like painting and to recreating a huge spirituality that is not seen in other paintings.

I had the privilege of interviewing him not once, but eight, ten, fifteen, many times, the outstanding painter whose artlessness contrasted with his genius.

I keep pleasant memories of the times when the master expressed his poetic subtleties and his ever wise remarks on one of his works, even in facing the new works.

Owner of a great genius and admirable intelligence. Aguilera used to walk through the streets, always carrying a folded magazine in his hands for covering himself from the sun.

Master Aguilera’s artistic vocation lasted for his lifetime. It was an elixir that he couldn’t stop drinking so as to become plentiful and happy.

Luis Alfonso Méndez Lara
Periodista.



Master Aguilera has devoted his entire life to painting with a solid and sustained vocation, from it, he has made a exemplar calling impossible to surpass. Great self-learned artists, authentic and courageous in face of the challenges imposed by this difficult profession.

Now, at last, his private collection goes out to the light so that the world may know about it, we shall have the opportunity to admire his paintings, that remained hidden, as a valuable treasury, jealously kept by his creator. Master Aguilera’s work provides the spiritual nourishment so necessary for the human being, mainly in this material, alienating age of universal anxiety.

Salvador Almaraz
Alumno.



Master José Dolores Aguilera knows how to interpret, through symbols, people’s homesickness for a better world based upon the every day fight for freedom and for a bit of political and social justice.

His major events were the paintings made by him, and his great achievement, to see his vocation fulfilled. Self-learned, he became an authority on his job having the heart of a poet and the fantasy of an original artist.

In some of his main works, the mystic quantity turns into sensuality, like in Outshine©; (1962) where a woman with a half veil in her face and with a crown of white casahuate flowers, appears absorbed in ecstasy in the middle of the every day rush.

In the same way, other symbolic figures of men and women, angels and children, saints and sinners range from the worldly and the celestial, the reality and the fantasy, as if the painter’s religious features were made up of the every day living and such a living was absorbed by faith and fantasy.

Jose Dolores Aguilera catches the super-earhtly in its full nature and with very precise realistic details. He painted murals in different churches of the central region and in other places that witness the art that takes miracles away from the anti-natural and ecstasy away from the morbid, due to the fact that under Aguilera’s talented hand, visions, illusions, and chimeras turn into something universally human. This is best regarded on masterpieces like Eucharistic Congress© (1940), Mater Dolorosa© (1945), The Beggar© (1945), Boy playing the Flute© (1950), Squash Blossom woman seller© (1960), Ensoñación© (1960’s) The Floating Marina© (1963), The Scribe© (1970) Painting a Muse© (1980), and in other paintings.

Through eight decades of work, if Aguilera is considered to have started drawing since he was a kid, the size of his paintings changed, his plastic elements arrangement flourished, his color enriched and even his artistic writing transformed as time went by, this evolution reveals a strong expression painter who imposes a supernatural and fantastic psychic situation to the audience so that they may solve it up, to the extent allowed by their imaginative and emotional skills.

Aguilera’s great success is due both to his talent for catching symbolic shapes and to the sensitivity of the public who understands and interprets them.

Bertha Taracena.
Asociación Internacioal de Críticos de Arte
(AICA) de México



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