Mauricio Toussaint

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Mauricio Toussaint (b. 1960 in Guadalajara, Mexico) is a Mexican contemporary artist. Of French and Mexican descent, Toussaint was interested in making art from a young age. Following his parents’ expectations to make a living, he entered the Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara to obtain a degree in architecture (he graduated in 1985 with a Bachelor of Science degree). During this time, he was encouraged by a professor from the nearby Visual Arts Department to make art on his own. Invited to work at the open workshop at the Centro de Arte Moderno, he made prints from 1982-83 and soon after, he embarked on a series of paintings. By the mid 1980s, he had forged relationships with art professionals from the center, and was soon asked to collaborate as an assistant curator at the Instituto Cultural Cabañas—his career in architecture officially replaced with art.

For the next several years, his paintings and prints were dominated by representational subject matter, but by the 1990s his approach changed to more conceptual concerns. In 1995 Toussaint came to the United States, lured by friends in the music business who encouraged him to join them in Miami. After three years he realized that the stereotypical imagery prevalent in the area was not part of his personal experience, so he left for Arizona, first settling in Phoenix, and finally in Tucson. He became a Dinnerware Art Gallery member from 2000 to 2004. He has had several exhibits in different Mexican cities as well as other countries like Spain, France, Korea and the United Sates.

For the past eight years he has been using and experimentng on his work with beeswax, technique named Encaustic. He also works over Amate paper on wooden panels.

Although his paintings, created by overlapping layers, filled with surprise, were described sometimes like cryptograms or coded paintings, and are not easily definable in terms of conventional categories. He used the drawing as a means with which he created the unusual compositions, admitting that its artistic activity was rooted in the introspection. In that sense the harmony and the careful position of the elements in his paintings, with the hallucinating fragmentation of text, comes from the Kabbalah and readings of the occult. Toussaint work is a product of the conscience and the I-conscious, not timid, but emotional.