Susana Noriega

Susana Noriega Rivero (born 1952) is a contemporary Mexican painter, personal and avant-garde in style, inscribed in the abstract expressionist and surrealist movements, and linked in her middle age with outsider art. Often, outsider art expresses extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.

Born in Mexico City, as a teenager Noriega Rivero took part in various contests, and in 1971 her artistic interests led her to attend the workshops of great masters, such as Raúl Anguiano, Rodolfo Nieto, Luis Velasco, Guillermo Zapfe, and Pascual Santillán.

Although at the same time she studied advertising and psychology, she recognized herself as a painter, and she devoted most of her time to pursuing this activity.

She has made incursions into many techniques: engraving and wood carving; paper engraving; graphic projects for sculpture, as well as painting with charcoal, pigments with oil or water, resins, marble powder, sand and soil, all of them on canvas, wood, clay, stone and paper.

She has specialized in handling graphite and charcoal on paper, as well as mixed techniques with pigments and water or oil, ground marble, sands and resins on canvas. She continuously renews herself, having developed a personal avant-garde style with some influence from abstract expressionism and surrealism. Outsider art is conventionally considered as one of the trends of informalism, but in this painter it is fused with neo-figurative art, an expressionist revival in modern form of figurative art. The term "neo-figurative" emerged in the 1960s in Mexico and Spain to represent a new form of figurative art.

The greatest exponent of outsider art, the French Jean Dubuffet, influenced by Hans Prinzhorn's book Artistry of the Mentally Ill, coined the term art brut, which may be approximately translated as "art in the rough", to refer to the art made by non-professionals, who do not follow aesthetic rules, such as social misfits, children, mentally troubled people, prisoners, etc. Dubuffet gathered a collection of this kind of paintings, which includes works by the Swiss Aloïse Corbaz, the Spanish Alfredo Pirucha and the Swiss Adolf Wölfli. Dubuffet aspired to create an art free from intellectual worries, in which elementary, childish and often cruel figures prevail.

Some traits of Noriega's work in line with outsider art are:

• Rough, spontaneous, grotesque and thoughtless quality, akin to the unconscious.
• Images that reflect her inner world.
• Use of onirist-like devices.
• Rejection of the traditional approaches to composition (coherence, organization, homogeneity, etc.).
• Great freedom in drawing and palette (earthy, pale or bright colors prevail depending on the mood of each painting).
• Use of very different materials mixed with the paint (plaster, sand, cement, gravel), which add texture and relief.
• Expressive effects through richly material, textured effects.
• Recurring motifs developed during extended periods of time (flower vases, the human body, musical instruments, hearts, animals).

Her first single exhibition, in the Alliance Française at San Ángel in Mexico City, was inaugurated on Friday, April 27, 1979. The Mexico City paper Novedades reviewed:

An exhibition was opened by painter Susana Noriega, who launches her first single show after having engaged in a series of collective ones. […] The exhibit is made up of 38 graphite and mixed technique paintings. […] [The exhibitor] was accompanied by […] the principal and assistant headmaster of the Alliance Française at San Ángel, Alain Gallas and Robert Guyon. Among the guests of honor was also the Cultural Under-Secretary-General with the [French] Embassy, Patrick Abecasis. […] The exhibition may bevisited until May 10.

She went on to exhibit, either individually or collectively, in the following venues and galleries:

• Galería Estela Shapiro, Mexico City, 1980
• Centro de Estudios en Ciencias de la Comunicación, Mexico City, 1982, 1983
• Secretaría de Cultura y Bienestar Social del gobierno del estado de Querétaro (today Instituto Queretano de la Cultura y las Artes), México, 1985, l986, l987
• Casa de Cultura de Toluca, State of Mexico, 1991, 1992
• Centro Cultural Juan Rulfo, Mixcoac, Mexico City, 1996
• Mandarin House Restaurant Exhibition Hall, San Ángel, Mexico City, 1996, 1997
• Misrachi Gallery, Oaxaca, México, 1998
• Casa de las Campanas de Tlalpan, Mexico City, 1998, 1999, 2000
• X-Dada Exhibition Center, 2001
• Constante y Asociados Gallery, 1999, 2000, 2201, 2002
• Casa de la Cultura Jaime Sabines, Galerías Adán y Eva, Mexico City, 2002
• La Cueva de Bouchot, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005
• The painter's studio, 2006-2013
• Goiko Arte, online gallery, 2013-2018
• Café-Arte, Guadalupe Inn, Mexico City, 2014
• Centro Cultural Juan Rulfo, Mixcoac, Mexico City, 2016

From the 1960s she has contributed with her paintings to different media, such as magazines Plural (currently Vuelta) and Sí para Jóvenes, andnewspapers El Sol de Querétaro and El Sol de Toluca. She has also illustrated short-story and poetry collections.

Virginia Aspe Armella, Norma Barquet, Enrique Beraha, Alfonso and Ernesto Bolio, Ezequiel Castro, Ana Laura Constante, Paloma De Lille, Rubén Durand, Cecilia and María Luisa Elío, Francisco Franco Ibargüengoitia, Carlos Fuentes, Jomí García Ascot, Raúl Gasca, Alicia Ibáñez Parkman, Luis Legarreta, Alberto Lifshitz, Carmen Madero, Pablo Marentes, Martha Maza, Maricela Mir, Héctor Muciño, Pedro Ojeda, Octavio Paz, Erwin Preston, Mario Quiñones, Agustín and Nieves Rivero Blásquez, Héctor Rivero Borrell, Ricardo Secín, Carlos Serrano, Estela Shapiro, Malke Tapuach, Ángela Treviño, Carmen Ubaldini, Luis Velasco.