Landscape painting in contemporary Mexico encompasses a wide spectrum of visions and styles. It includes both striking Mexican vistas as well as abstract views of shifting geographies, urban landscapes, and fields of colour. A diverse visual language is used to describe a landscape, ranging from realism to surrealism to abstraction. Moreover, that which constitutes a natural or an urban landscape varies from painting to painting: a mountain view, rows of buildings, a towering cactus, a fantastic garden, totemic blocks of building-shaped figures, street grids, or suggestive planes of colour. Above all, today's landscape painting provides a sense of place, be it rural, urban, or purely psychological, identifiable or not.

After the Revolution ended in 1921, the Mexican government fostered the development of the Muralist movement. Artists were commissioned to paint the walls of public buildings. These highly innovative, talented, compelling painters worked in a forceful and realistic language, dramatically establishing an iconography and style that inspired generations of Mexican painters including Xavier Castellanos.

In Castellanos's work we find a broad lexicon of representative and narrative imagery complimented by a refreshing exploration of the expressive possibilities of nature and urban landscapes rarely seen in today's contemporary art. His power, simplicity and playful command of vivid colours within bold outlines is reminiscent of Expressionism and Fauvism. His style is replete with sensual curves and primitive forms.

The Mexican Landscape paintings of Xavier Castellanos reverberate with a sense of place yet a lack of time, and they suggest a bit of magical realism. They entice us with their views of colour-filled streets, lush gardens, and vibrant views. These paintings evoke great intensity while portraying sleepy colonial hill towns and melodic landscapes. They convey a lavish view of the towns and landscapes. Xavier's Urban Landscapes, Happy People, and Dreams Paintings add several layers of depth beyond this; rich in colour and filled with psychological messages, these paintings are a unique manifestation of the subconscious process of creating new ideas and new art.

I am interested in the problems associated with urban areas; I am intrigued and worried by their impact upon the populations within them. This concern is reflected in various forms of pollution (environmental contamination, visual pollution, deteriorating living conditions, etc.) in my urban landscape paintings. My work speaks about issues that exist in the world around me and that affect me directly now, in the past, and in the future. The paintings critically evaluate our social "habitat", institutions, and industries, as well as artistic culture itself. They are the result of social construction, which is itself the product of Politics.

The existing urban landscape contexts (large cities where I have lived) are the object of my creative effort. On one hand, most of the paintings are pessimistic constructions---fragments of urban landscapes, sometimes represented in satirical and cynical ways. Toxicosis, Sprawl, Contradiction, Construction, Isolation, Lack of Communication, Despair and Lack of Space are accurate titles for some of the pieces. These paintings go beyond the immediate sphere of artistic creation to address non-artistic contexts. I want them to scream and to bear witness to the nonsense, decay, and inhumanity of overcrowded cities created by our 20th century Advanced Technological Society, in which the individual has been put away in second or third place.

On the other hand, I often think of poetry and painting as the same art form where colourful strokes and words connect to create a unified whole. Just as literary artists often convey a story between the lines of a text, I paint a vision between colours and ideas. I juxtapose overwhelming urban landscapes with premonitory dreams. Virtual colours serve as a visual equivalent for the "invisible" energy that occurs in the interaction between the artist and the landscape. I consider my canvases as enigmatic "maps" that negotiate real and emotional space. In this way, the often childish figures, buildings and symbols drifting through the paintings may be thought of as the cartography of these maps. The viewer has to elucidate these maps in order for him to read inside the head of the artist and, as a result, inside himself. In the maps, remnants become revitalised, erased fragments reappear, and signs and symbols talk to themselves; perhaps they speak quietly about invisible mirrors, old labyrinths, or their own inescapable death.

I am trying to portray an urban context in which, I feel, all orders become mixed and confused: animal, vegetable, mineral and human. I paint, between rigidity and overflow, large uniform surfaces next to small detailed sections. I want to show that there is movement, a flux and reflux of a broad lexicon of representative and narrative imagery. I want to point out, as others have before me, the relationship between the contexts of existing urban decay and our political and social actions, or lack thereof.

Begun in January of 2001, the Happy People series is the most recent collection of paintings by Xavier Castellanos. These new works are the follow up to and natural progression of his popular Urban Landscape series. As those paintings slowly saw buildings take on more human characteristics and forms, these new works explore the totemic figure as both a physical construct and an emotional conduit. Since ancient times, the human figure has been the most prominent form in all of art. From Egyptian columns (4000--3000 BC) to the Roman Column of Trajan (113 AD) to Native American totems, the human figure has always caputred the eye and imagination of artists and collectors alike.

With the Happy People series, Castellanos celebrates and explodes the notion of the human form, referencing its history which simultaneously seeking to change the way in which we conceive of the body. By allowing the human form to appear outside the physical constraints of limbs and fully realised torsos, Castellanos creates highly original portraits in which the emotional and psychological history of a person or persons is laid bare before the viewer's eyes. "Happy", therefore, seems both a sincere and an ironic adjective, as the individual faces and figures that make up these intense and intensely colourful paintings span the entire range of emotions. No matter their joy or despair, these impassioned figures stand up against a background of human experience, a testament to the artist's skill in portraying the elemental and the intellectual in strong colours and deft brushstrokes.