Artist Bio

ElSur El Sur is a Mexican artist, author of several Installations in which he combines image, text and music. He has published 90 micro-fictions and his musical output has been performed in several forums, among them: The Latin American “Manuel Enriquez”. He has also written academic essays that explore the relationship between art and economics.

At a young age, he studied piano in his natal city, Monterrey, with pianist Carmen Franco Vadillo, a graduate from the National Conservatoire of Music, and attended music theory classes with Radko Tichavsky, a Czech composer graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

At the age of 16, he abandoned his musical studies and his involvement with local rock bands, and entered the economics school. Later, he received an MA degree from El Colegio de Mexico at the age of 23, and a PhD from Harvard in 2004. After that, he returned to work in Mexico.

At the age 33, he contacted Mexican composer Mario Lavista, who recommended him to start studies with Armando Luna at his Composition Workshop at the National Conservatoire of Music. Three years later, ElSur El Sur abandoned his job as civil servant to compose, write and paint.

In 2011, he started publishing micro-fictions in newspaper El Porvenir, in collaboration with his mother. In 2013, his musical piece for flute and tuba, Funeral March from Suite For Javi, was premiered at the University of the Cloister, the same compound where the 17th century Mexican poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, lived and was buried.

The following year, a record of his pop song “Deja Que” came to live. In 2015, his piece for bassoon solo, A Poet and its Old Poem, inspired by a poem in prose by literature Nobel prize winner Octavio Paz, was premiered during the religious festivities of the Church of Xoco in Mexico City. In 2016, his painting El Mar participated in the collective exhibition “Passion for Art”, organized by Galería Marstelle in Polanco, Mexico City, along with paintings by Mexican Masters Raúl Anguiano, Leonardo Nierman, Luis Nizhisawa, Hermenegildo Sosa and Aliria Morales, among others.

He currently works in a project titled “What is the meaning of being alive?”, in which 143 people were invited to write about the meaning of life, and for which ElSur El Sur prepared 23 paintings: Mixed media on paper (42 cm x 59 cm), that opened with a conference in November, 2016, in Tlaxcala, Mexico. He also plays flute, every other Saturday, with his jazz band Hostal Mercedes Av.