By Pamela Fink

When a figure who has always been there fades away, it seems as if everyone competes to see who can pay tribute to them the fastest, along with an excess of generic words that have been repeated so much that they mean little or nothing anymore.

The Last of the Surrealists He has departed, leaving us with the absurdity and laughter that life seemed to him, exhaling his last breath surrounded by his family and loved ones in San Miguel de Allende. 

The man who gained notoriety for his now so characteristic hand-chair in the sixties was a contemporary of masters such as his expressionist tutor in architecture Mathias Goeritz or the famous surrealists Carrington and Edward James. 

During his architectural studies, the artist felt repelled by the mental rigidity of the tutors, which directly resembled the enemies of the extraordinary Howard Roark, protagonist of Ayn Rand's quintessential objectivist novel, "The Fountainhead.".

The only tutor with whom he felt an affinity in his rebellion was the great Mathias Goeritz, who was a promoter of his student's unconventional ideas as well as the author of the now famous Satellite Towers. 

Another of his promoters was the great Remedios Varo who advised him to hold his first exhibition at the Diana Gallery and with which he had some success by selling his first three works.

Later on, he would create his most famous piece, which he considers an ugly sculpture and a semi-comfortable chair that became so famous that it sold thousands of reproductions, some of his own making and others from the most acclaimed Chinese pirates; both indistinguishable in their surreal spirit.

The enemy of minimalist art and lover of sacred geometry à la Alex Gray but with greater symbolism, considered that the divine was found in nature and in art, whose creation was enough for him to capture what he could not express in absurd words. 

Perhaps a novel that can help us understand Friedeberg's creation is after consulting Erasmus of Rotterdam's short text entitled "In Praise of Folly," which tells us about the benefits of being crazy and the nobility and creativity that go with it.

After watching the documentary “Pedro” by Liora Bialostozky, we feel that we can better understand Pedro's endearing and grumpy personality, where the simplest of phrases carries a double meaning that one only notices after listening carefully.

After his passing, which we hope was from a fit of laughter as the author wished, his legacy will surely continue thanks to the work of Diana and David Friedeberg, whose projects, such as the Casa Diana museum with many of the author's pieces, as well as Friedeberg Kids whose playful designs for children are based on the work of the much-loved author. 

We invite all our readers to blow their minds and think beyond our possibilities until we reach this absurdity that we call life.