Esther L. Padilla

Biography

Plastic artist born in San Antonio, Texas, a territory with which she never identified herself and perceives a distant aversion. Proud to come from an Oaxacan mother who protected her and showed her eternal affection during a very difficult, lonely childhood in the streets of gargantuan Mexico City, she took refuge in her care and, carrying her example first hand, she embodies examples of this love in her ceramic and painting protagonists. Perhaps her chosen path was determined by her DNA tainted by her inheritance from a grandfather sculptor of religious images, or perhaps just the need to engender her own creations just as her mother did with her.

Esther pursued a Bachelor's Degree in Sciences and Humanities in Oaxaca where she became interested in the arts, and, in 1995, she is awarded the FONCA scholarship for Young Creators to carry out her first ceramic project “The Dream of the Stone”. In 1998, she obtained a certification in Plastic Arts with a specialty in sculpture at the School of Fine Arts of the Autonomous University of Benito Juárez. She continued her education at the Taller Rufino Tamayo in the area of ceramics with a complete seriousness; and thus, began her career as a visual artist. She then joined the collective of Oaxaca women artists, ARMO.

Esther's work is defined as private and autobiographical. Her topics of interest go beyond the everyday or the aesthetic. Her language is narrative and figurative, but she probes past traumas and personal critiques of the image of the domestic role of a woman which she refutes in her current life. Mother of two children, she questions motherhood, patriarchy and her existence. Colors, such as red and orange, are converted into codes and analogies to symbolize the matter of creation that runs through the veins and covers the existence of beings in this world; these colors that take on the meaning of the sacred, the fiery and the carnal.

Just like a story, she tells her story and her tragedies with mythical characters of her own creation. She distinguishes them using different painting techniques and temperature tones in planes of autonomous perspectives: the monochromatic ones are non-existences, the illustrated ones the consequence of an act of innocence. She handles oil paint with a feeling of mass and volume, as if she were molding the paint into three-dimensional shapes. Egg tempera alone is used for a ghostly illusion.

Her sculptural work, a work of greater power, is tactile and gestural expressiveness. You can be able to feel the molding of the raw clay, the sound of crying faces and the shuddering of gazes. Dislocated heads with lost looks cover a hole in a vessel; canine teeth inhabit exclamation mouths; faceless girls huddle together to hear each other; A female figure covering her ears balances on what looks like a piece of broken brick. Passionate and revealing of her career as a woman, daughter, mother and creator are these numismatic expressions in the raw clay of Esther Padilla.

Teresa Diaz Diez

Curator