Since when have you been concentrating in your art on scenes of domestic middle class reality in Mexico?

I must have begun to paint in this way in about 1986. Before that I had painted things that had to do in a certain sense with what I paint now. I've always done interior views but the earlier ones were more imaginary. They were loaded with nostalgia. When I was growing up, nostalgia was a very strong force in our lives. Anyway, I began to realize that my "imaginary" paintings were becoming too repetitious and so I began to look outside my own reality.

I know that much of your earlier work was in a somewhat surrealist vein.

Well, in a way I'd always been involved in both the real and what you might call the surreal. It's like an artistic schizophrenia. The world in which I was raised was very divorced from real life. Our father, an exile from the Spanish Civil War had created a scale of aesthetic values for us that was really ferocious. The separation of our lives inside the family circle from the outside was really dramatic. The aesthetic ideas with which I grew up were more European, more classical. Symmetry and harmony were important. But the rules we followed weren't those that existed in Mexico. For example, as children we always had to dress within a certain range of colors. We couldn't wear anything too bright because that would be considered vulgar. Lack of order was also something not to be tolerated. Good taste was everything for my family. Everything had to be exquisite and refined.

Would you say that this type of attitude toward life was "anti-Mexican" in a sense?

No, not anti-Mexican but just unrealistic. In fact, there were many people in my father's circle who were very concerned about traditional Mexican things-objects, old woods, natural fibers and so on-plastic was considered horrible. They were concerned about so many things that were part of a Mexican reality that no longer existed. They tried to reject the banal things of life. And those everyday things were the ones I ultimately realized I had to depict in my work.

However, I think it's important to explain that this aesthetically rigid upbringing was actually a very positive aspect of my development. It was so overwhelming and people were so secure in their ideas about how things should be that it made it all the more important for me to fight it and rebel against it. It actually gave me the strength to generate my own vision, my own path for my art. I also have to recognize that the influence of my father on my art was in so many ways of enormous importance for me. He taught me a great deal and I am very grateful for his influence.