Edgar Cano, Life is Beautiful, 2022. Oil on linen. Photograph by Anna Poe.
Free First Sunday: Celebrate South Arts
Artist Edgar Cano
Sunday, June 7 from 1–4 PM
Edgar Cano Artist Lecture and Demo from 2-4 PM
Free and open to the public
Create art inspired by the South Arts Southern Prize & State Fellowships for Visual Arts exhibition. Make your own mixed-media art house inspired by works on view. Join artist Edgar Cano at 2 PM for a discussion of his work, currently featured in the South Arts exhibition. Afterwards, from 3:15-4 PM, Cano will do a figure drawing demo in the galleries near his art.
Generous support provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program. South Arts’ Southern Prize & State Fellowships for Visual Arts is supported by the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation, the Windgate Foundation, Southern First Bank, The Warner Fund, and many generous donors.
About the Artist
Edgar Cano began his career in the visual arts by creating illustrations and scenographies for theater during his studies at the Faculty of Arts in Xalapa, Veracruz (UV). Over more than two decades of artistic practice, he has received numerous national and international recognitions. Most recently, he was awarded by the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant, NY (2025), also, he received Best in Show at both the 61st Juried Exhibition at the Masur Museum of Art in Monroe, Louisiana, and the 16th Surreal Salon at the Baton Rouge Gallery, in 2024.
He has also been the recipient of several prestigious grants, including the FONCA Young Creators Fellowship (2010 and 2012). In 2014, Cano was selected as a member of Mexico’s National System of Art Creators SNCA (2014 and 2021) in the painting category.
In 2018, he received funding through the FONCA Promotion and Co-Investment Program to produce his most ambitious solo exhibition, El Centro Único. In 2018 and 2023, he served as juror for the SNCA Selection Committee in the painting category, and in 2018, he also served on the jury of the 11th National Biennial of Painting and Printmaking Alfredo Zalce in Morelia, Michoacán.
To date, Cano has presented eighteen solo exhibitions in Mexico and abroad and participated in more than fifty group exhibitions internationally. His work has been exhibited in countries such as Argentina, Canada, England, Italy, Japan, the United States, Serbia, and Sweden, and forms part of various public and private collections.
Cano moved to Louisiana to pursue a Master of Arts in Visual Arts at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. He currently lives in Natchitoches with his family, where he works as a professional artist and Assistant Professor of Art.
Artist Statement
The painting I do is simultaneously interested in its own process and in events that come from unusual aspects of everyday life. I use my own or others' experiences, coming from old archives as well as from my photographic collection, as a visual narrative. I try to generate with my images a chronic, a language that expands the message or accentuates a sort of script in order to create different evocations and a kind of convergence point where the author, the viewer, and the memory will be located. A wink of unreality peers through some of the cracks in my works to warn those who see that something does not fit, that everything is not as it is thought, that the established world breaks down on its most fragile side, by the least thought of.
The axis I resort to, always figurative but also recreated and complex, is the body, which is deposited on the canvas and configures correlations that combine reality and fiction to establish a logic that intentionally dilutes objectivity and constructs, in turn, a possible metaphor.
In the framework behind the works, I intend to break down the technique to create images that are not alien to tradition, but also not from the defense of a fragile flag. My aesthetic standard is the work it
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