Editorial. Siqueiros

Sebastián Pineda Buitrago, "Editorial", Proteo 4 (septiembre, 2026)

El poeta comunista francés Paul Éluard dedicó al pintor mexicano David Alfaro Siqueiros un tremendo poema «À David-Alfaro Siqueiros» (integrado con frecuencia bajo la dedicatoria «Pour David-Alfaro Siqueiros» o recogido en sus antologías de homenaje a pintores camaradas, como Voir, y reeditado en carpetas litográficas como la Mountain Suite). Éluard —quien visitó a Siqueiros en México en dos ocasiones durante sus viajes de posguerra patrocinados por el Consejo Mundial de la Paz— celebró la pintura del muralista como una fuerza tectónica donde la poesía no se contempla, sino que estalla:

«Tu as tracé le cercle où la foudre s’enferme,

L’homme en marche franchit la terreur de la terre...»

(Has trazado el círculo donde se encierra el rayo,

el hombre en marcha cruza el terror de la tierra...)

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Dado que acabo de citar un poema en francés, ahora permítanme pasar al inglés... 

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This issue of Proteo takes that premise as the direct, radical continuation of our research on the volcanologist painter: «Dr. Atl’s Aerolandscapes, Futurism and the Mexican Revolution», published in the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies (vol. 16, De Gruyter Brill, 2026, doi: 10.1515/9783689240943-toc). 

Ed. Günther Berghaus

 From that molten rock sprang the Mexican Revolution of 1910—the first, most incendiary populist uprising of the twentieth century, preceding the Bolsheviks of 1917, and whose shrapnel still threatens to tear through our contemporary complacency. 

To trace the history of twentieth-century art is to inspect the two great totalitarian butcheries of modernity: fascism and communism. There is no middle ground, no humanitarian shelter, no moral alibi. Gerardo Murillo ultimately shipwrecked himself upon antisemitic, Nazi, and philofascist delirium; his favorite disciple, David Alfaro Siqueiros, gripped the compressed-air spray gun with the fanatical zeal of a convert kneeling before the dogma of the Third International.

In our chapter "Historia y significación del muralismo mexicano: la conquista del espacio público en la era de la «abstracción»" (published in La desclasificación de las artes, Instituto Juan Andrés, Madrid, 2026), we dismantled the monumental imposture of this civic pantheon to recover an abstract, experimental, and dissident Siqueiros. Yet even that critical rescue must be assaulted: Siqueiros’s genius does not reside in an unblemished formal purity, but in his organic complicity with the industrial war machine. The Duco pyroxylin and heavy compressors he wielded in Manhattan in 1936 were never painter's brushes; they were mortars spitting synthetic enamel straight into the spectator's eyes. The interwar avant-garde was the dress rehearsal for carpet bombing.

Faced with this barrage of live artillery, the contemporary archive petrifies everything it touches. It mummifies shrapnel into neat library indices, traps barricades behind climate-controlled glass vitrines, and charges digital admission tickets to behold what was built to smash down the wall. The contemporary academy begs for toothless pedagogy and taxidermic heritage. Against these morticians of memory, Philip Marlowe slips into the dark alleys of Los Angeles to file the forensic report on América Tropical; and Nietzsche, rising from his untimely meditation of 1874, delivers our death sentence: whoever gluts himself on history loses the steady pulse required to pull the trigger.