“Buy the ticket, take the ride." Hunter S. Thompson

Oscar Wilde said, that each one of us received a gift from fate, the genius that will make us the person we are in life, but will also be the whip with which we punish ourselves for everything received. Not distant from Plato’s vision, about the daimon that accompanies us throughout life to make us comply with our fate even at the expense of our own will.

Worlds populated by daimones, fallen angels and demons, now transformed into our contemporary collective unconscious, wander among us as a whispering voice, who come singing a song ancestrally known in the form of people, images, words and sounds that timelessly come and go; both in wakefulness and dreams, that are both sides of the same coin we all throw at some point.

No doubt José Luis Sánchez Rull threw it once, but the most important things in our lives go unnoticed at the time. If not judge for yourself...

Who in their right mind would move to Tláhuac, which is so far from the hand of God and the justice of man!? After making a life and an art career in New York City, only a daring, naïve, saint or monster, or a combination of all, would take this decision. This undoubtedly marked the life and work of José Luis Sánchez Rull since his return to Mexico.

Home, work and life flooded with these "beings", all exiles in that part of Mexico City. A geographical and emotional Frankenstein, a comic-tragic entity of today’s Mexico. Prometheus chained to dust, peseros, fried food, street vendors and stray dogs, a maze of decisions that always return to themselves, demanded by who knows who’s chaotic god of bureaucracy - such is Sanchez Rull’s work. Made from scrap, collected fragments of emotions, memories, absences, desires, words and images of art, text, literature and American comics, trying to hold life together in the middle of this fortress which is his home and studio in Tlahuac. Here is where this parapsychological dialogue takes place, with his own shadows, ghosts, trying to freeze them once and again over time in his drawings and paintings, willing to ask what happened to them, what worlds have they visited and if things outdoors are “enlightened”, more "modern" and "happier". As we are led to believe by men who simplify and planify this contemporary world where imagination and the risk of taking a road in life has only become a Wii or Playstation game ... Nothing to fear from daimones, fallen angels and demons from a real hell that are within us, waiting for a glimpse of doubt, before what our eyes “see” they will reveal with all their demolishing and terrifying “beauty”.

Sitting on the edge of this dense dibujística materia that is José Luis Sánchez Rull’s work, and talking about something else, I find these words from Schopenhauer that he is so fond of: "Life must be at every point seen as a stern lesson that teaches us precisely when we can not understand how we could possibly need that lesson, because we have guided our thinking towards other very different objectives. Accordingly we must therefore look back with pleasure to our departed friends, thinking they have overcome this lesson and with the sincere hope that this lesson has been successful. And with the same perspective we must face our own death as an event, desired and nice, instead of with hesitation and fear, as usually happens.”

- Daniel Guzmán, ciudad de México, mayo del 2012.