...He writes him a letter and sends his son to him to make a man of him. Canek answers him by telling him that he will make an Indian of his son...
Canek. History and legend of a Mayan man
Ermilo Abreu Gomez

An art worker, muralist, easel painter, and sculptor, Rafael Baca currently focuses his pictorial work on the investigation of the mythology of the Toltec-Mexica and Mayan cultures, as well as the creation of Mexican folk art. He is a self-taught and multidisciplinary artist, born in Mexico City in 1981.
At the age of 19, she leaves CDMX in search of knowledge and thus arrives in the jungle of Chiapas and the mountains of Guerrero, where for more than 15 years she absorbed and learned as much as possible from  men of those lands; During those years he worked in art and made it his way of life, finding in the culture and traditions of those remote places, part of our history lost in time.
Communities of the Mixteco, Tlapaneco, Amusgo and Nahua peoples in the mountains of Guerrero and the small coast of Oaxaca and Tojolabal, Chol, Tzeltal and Tzotzil in the mountains and jungle of Chiapas, offered him a different panorama from the one he had learned in his place of origin, where he understood that the ancient roots of our culture, the legends, the mythology and the cosmovision of our native peoples are alive and are represented in
dances, masks, rituals and ancient beliefs of the relationship between human beings and nature, learned about the correlation of forces between the tangible world and the spiritual world, witnessed rituals and traditions hidden from the eyes of the vast majority of people, he learned from simple metaphors of peasants, he was a disciple of wise women at the foot of a stove, he learned about magic and the existence of the nahuales... With the passage of time he was embracing that worldview, making it his own, giving it a primordial place in his thought and his way of relating to the world, revealing that universe in his mural work. Where his characters are a mixture of that world with which he lived daily and the mythology of our ancient world, creating a timeless dialogue between the present and our origins. The most significant example of this are his "rabbit children", a characteristic hallmark of his work and that in the scenes of his murals "break" time and serve as curious, playful, irreverent and transgressive witnesses... that go beyond limits between the mundane and the mythical and record the events captured. Rafael Baca appeals to the discourse of re-signifying and reinventing Mexican popular art from what was learned in indigenous communities; through the creation of his IK-KAN Gallery-Workshop where, in addition to carrying out his pictorial and graphic work, together with his partner, the artist Irene Altamirano, he works with the traditional cartonería technique and creates alebrijes, masks, catrinas and skulls. In this sense, for Rafael Baca, the commitment to the creation of alebrijes, in addition to being a vindication and a tribute to his city origin, these magical beings are a metaphor, a ritual, they are the creation of a deity or an archetype that lives in our psyche, is the possibility of bringing to this reality together with those beings, elements that should not be lost within a collective culture and that survive as beliefs, fears, spirituality and roots that ask to come out to have a presence in this world. To create these pieces through which stories are told is to offer respect to these forces. For Rafael Baca, the system made us believe that our essence and identity were worthless and that we had to assimilate into Western culture; to aspire to material issues, to be successful economically and professionally no matter what… This distanced us so much from our roots, that it generated a disconnection between the towns, the people, their culture and their mystique.”
In his work, Rafael Baca invites us to weave into our cultural roots, to rediscover them with a new look... to understand those aspects that identify us and on many occasions unconsciously condition us as a society. Struggle to recover its magical-ritual-spiritual aspect that are background and figure in our current society.