The first thing customers do when they enter and the last thing they do when they leave is look at the colossal mural: 18 meters long and about six meters high. Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons has opened a new branch south of Mexico City, on the property that formerly housed CIBA Laboratories from the 1950s until 2021, today as Novartis Laboratories, and which is home to two murals by José Chávez Morado, one of the most representative painters and muralists of the nationalist movement in Mexico.
The work is mounted outside – in front of the car park – and inside the premises on two walls. Office workers, students, and app-based food delivery people are walking through the door. Everyone, without exception, looks attentively. “I don’t know if she’s the most beautiful in the world, but she’s one of the most beautiful,” confides an old man who came to meet his wife.
Next to the General Anaya metro station, in the direction of Tlalpan Sur, there is a sort of square in which, among other things, several food establishments, a gym and a self-service store coexist. One of the walls stands out from the others: a divinity, half-man, half-dead, holds a calaca in his left hand, a luminous torch, and in his human right hand what appears to be a kind of bone. Below him, men in loincloths look at him and implore; others complain, some cry.
From the back of the god, who seems to levitate, emerges a sort of green and purple cape, with vegetable textures and rough skin. This garment extends to the right and goes around the wall, inside the cafe, and becomes a huge snake head, surrounded by various elements of pre-Hispanic culture and the symbolism of ancestral medicine.
The works are Magic and medical science, health, disease And History of pre-Hispanic medicine. Strips, like those used to mark off the popcorn line in movie theaters, separate the artist’s creation from the audience’s hands. “It’s impressive,” said a student who came to buy a hit (cold, frothy coffee-based drink).
According to the Rimane restoration workshop, architect Alejandro Prieto commissioned Chávez Morado to create two murals for the laboratory company. The theme of the two murals revolves around pre-Hispanic practices and the conception of medicine, indicates a triptych published on the Internet. Inside the current Tim Hortons store, the artist combined the fresco with the glass mosaic to play with plasticity and give it continuity with the exterior mural.
Chávez Morado bequeathed a very rich social message to Mexican art, according to what the Ministry of Culture declared in a bulletin. Among his work, the murals located in Ciudad Universitaria (THE return of Quetzalcoatl; The conquest of energy; The science of work), in the Granaditas warehouse, in Guanajuato (I sing in Guanajuato), at the National Museum of Anthropology (Image of Mexico —sculptural relief—on the column The umbrella), and at the National Medical Center (Tribute to help), to name just a few.
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