Vidal Pinto Estrada was born on March 6^th, 1939; he died in September, 2014. If he were still alive he would surpass 75 years of age.

Vidal Pinto was perhaps an atypical border artist, his posture, supported by a wooden cane during his final years, wandered about tirelessly through the different cultural settings of the city. There were no small roads or worlds for him, his artery flows had unlimited frequent visitor stations.

The Tijuana Cultural Center was such a place, maybe one of the most frequent and entailing. From the earliest of times, those related to the debates about to whom the exhibition halls belonged to, his work already visited these walls. His lengthy series were already being presented to the public in groups or individually. He was a pioneer, an asset in the photography groups, tireless in remote exhibiting incursions.

As a way of honoring his artistic activities and recognizing that all efforts in the fields of art and culture are related to the going and returning lanes that represent future and past, the Tijuana Cultural Center has given the name of Vidal Pinto Photography Hallway to the institutional exhibit space that had become a special soundbox for photograph in this last period.

The indomitable mark of sectarianism was not present in Vidal Pinto. He attended exhibits by young artists and by artists from his generation all the same. He was alien towards clan spirits. His work was curated for exhibitions such as Strange New World and Obra Negra. Una aproximación a la construcción de la cultura visual de Tijuana, amongst many others.

Nobody in the world of image authors, curators and/or promoters in this city –including its multidimensional concept with California– has been oblivious to him. He was a contemporary of Robert Mapplethorpe with whom, for decades, established curious and sui géneris association and visual controversy; and also a professed sympathizer of Josef Sudek, hero of perfectionism, amongst other facets.

The heritage in his work is immense, as endless as it is unexplored. His fundamental and habitually prolonged creative and conceptual impulses hint and expand on his fondness for form; the line’s vibrating subtleness; the body as seduction and as a battlefield; the stealthy charm and melancholy throughout the city; personal intimacy as a pretense and a purpose; beauty and the implied emotions in the tension between glint and darkness… the infallible nostalgia that feeds upon itself.

Juan Alfredo Valles Arzate