Colonisation, 'The Great City of Tenochtitlan' 1952

Diego Rivera made this fresco called 'The Great City of Tenochtitlan' here at the Palacio Nacional. It’s a huge thing, almost five metres wide! It’s a history painting, so there’s a lot to take in, but it's also about process, a bringing together of different stories, in a way that reminds me of my own painting sometimes. Look at how Rivera builds up the scene with these earthy browns and yellows, and the way he captures the texture of bodies, of armour, of the land itself. You can almost smell the dust. It's amazing how he builds up such a complex, multi-layered image out of these relatively simple strokes and colors. It’s a clash of worlds, old and new, and it's all captured in the materiality of the paint itself. It reminds me of some of Goya’s darker works, that same sense of history being played out in a chaotic, almost dreamlike way, never quite settling on one interpretation.