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Creative Process

Graphic adventure of Abel Vázquez on LP discs.

By Melva Medina

Grinding, cutting, depressing volumes and polishing planes. Digging, blocking, playing with lines, making textures. Imagining, shaping its own dreams and legends.

Putting the praxis of genius on that small round surface, which allowed him with nobility, to be matter and protagonist of his madness …

During the 80’s, the compact disc appeared as a great novelty due to its sound and fidelity, replacing the great LP discs, which were left in oblivion, littered and discarded as garbage.

Abel Vázquez, during the 90’s, waiting for the arrival of his little daughter and living the first years of his first daughter, finds in the acetates of LP discs, ideal matrices for the production of pieces of graphic work in the technique of the gravure and its subsequent printing using the experience of roll up.

Melva and Abel previously had already experimented in the engraving workshop on zinc and iron plates, intervening with varnishes and acids, inking with rollers of different hardnesses and transparent inks with various degrees of viscosity, they achieved depressions and qualities that gave spectacular results.

With the arrival of his two little girls, and with the idea of ​​achieving less toxic processes, it was wonderful to find new surfaces and mechanical resources from the grinding machines and hand motors they used to make the sculptures, now adapting them in the new matrices.

Disc acetates are smooth with handheld motor and dry tip; they are susceptible to sandpaper and polishers, they are loyal reproducers of line and texture. The millimeter lines recorded with audible music are now visually perceived as part of the rhythms in the compositions with color harmonies.

This is how Abel played, next to his fatherhood, enjoying his little daughters doing naive works evoking the childhood of Meztli and Citlalli, sharing one more adventure with Melva in the studio, in that small department of the 5th. Apartment, on Insurgentes Avenue in Mexico City.