Emilio Payán: Stopping Time

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Samuel's childhood Meléndrez Bayardo (1969) was born in Guadalajara. However, due to the activism of his father, Samuel Meléndrez Luévano, a student leader at the University of Guadalajara and member of the Mexican Communist Party, the family was forced to emigrate to Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1975, under the protective mantle of the Soviet Union, which at the time offered asylum to left-wing activists who were persecuted or harassed by the regimes of their countries of origin.

Meléndrez Luévano was a member of the party's Central Committee, alongside prominent figures such as Arnoldo Martínez Verdugo, Gilberto Rincón Gallardo, and Gerardo Unzueta, all of them exceptional and fundamental figures in the history of the Mexican left.

Young Samuel Meléndrez remembers his first strokes with crayons and colored pencils as if it were yesterday. He was between 5 and 6 years old when he sketched his first lines and filled the possibilities of his world with color. His childlike spontaneity was his form of expression for telling stories and exploring his surroundings, and thus began his journey through art. He attended the Escuela de Formación Artística Infantil (Children's Art Training School) of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Institute of Fine Arts), which offered high-quality education for children, which was fundamental to his artistic development. After living abroad for two years, Samuel Meléndrez attended middle school in Mexico City and, before the 1985 earthquake, returned to his native Guadalajara to finish high school. The time had come to decide his academic and professional future. The search for a career became more complicated and deeper when he discovered that his passion for drawing and painting had resurfaced, leading him to rethink his previous decisions and modify his path.

Although he did not complete his studies at the University of Guadalajara's School of Fine Arts, Meléndrez draws important inspiration from his work, such as Javier Campos Cabello, who was honored in a retrospective at the Cabañas Museum and is considered a master of tenebrism. He also draws inspiration from artists such as Paul Delvaux, Giorgio de Chirico, with his deep, dense, and clear skies, and René Magritte, as well as the painter, engraver, and caricaturist Manuel Ahumada.

Samuel found his style when he focused his work on the urban landscape; he considers himself a city addict, where he discovers the hidden beauty that lies beyond advertising and industry. His true passion lies in capturing the essence of architecture, as it is a way of paying homage to memory and the past. Through his work, he seeks to preserve the architectural legacy of the city he paints. His work combines realism and hyperrealism with surrealist and metaphysical elements from the first half of the 20th century, creating a parallel universe that seems to belong to a fictional world, provoking a sense of strangeness. Meléndrez has a deep love of photography and an obsession with projecting shadows from structures.

Meléndrez's pieces reflect on the painful awareness of the passage of time and its impact on our existence. The artist believes that one of the greatest human tragedies lies in the constant vocation for lost time: precious moments and irretrievable memories. His work functions as a reminder of the ghosts of the past, capturing the instant when time seems to stand still; thus, space and silence come alive through his paintings, which seek to preserve the ephemeral and give meaning to what is no longer there.

Samuel Meléndrez paints buildings filled with experiences and memories, and through architecture and memory, he finds a way to overcome the uncertainty that defines our present.