Of new figurations…

Oh, the “new” painting… how many tensions has it brought about in the mind and work of artists, art critics, curators, art dealers? Nowadays, remaining faithful to the canvas represents awareness, when it entails so much tradition, and the new means seem to bribe, to attract enthusiasts, by encouraging them to temporarily or permanently abandon its premises.

Pretending to be new on the pictorial field, which is as fertile as exploited, would seem to be too much… Rufo Caballero said once that “the new can be the old”,[i] in the middle of the aesthetic cannibalism that surrounds us. The quote, the plagiarism and the “free venture” have taken the lead on contemporary art… and why wouldn’t they? What’s the point in taking care of the “form” (the norm, what norm)?

The 20th century painting oscillated with pendular movement from abstraction to figuration, in consecutive gradations that were more or less happy, and that’s a fact. How could we read nowadays painting in the Latin American-Caribbean region if it’s not by using this logic, and the same happens in other regions? The transference and similarity on the poetics of artists from different countries and cultures confirms the myth of the global, and on the other hand, the so-called universality as alibi to the appropriation of already-coined aesthetic repertoires, which have been confirmed during the evolution of art history.

They say that there is nothing new under the Sun, but you get “motivated” again and again when some art critic talks about a “turning point”, “before and after”, “splitting” to put on the table the work of a young creator. Those phrases… are so dramatic that we love them, they have an effect, and there’s no doubt that they reach out many more people than what we believe. How can you presently be “a before and after”? If we continue watching eternal variations on the same genre, style, theme… in most of today’s painting; that eternal return. But I also think that what they say or how they say it isn’t so important either, it the artwork has its “public”, it has it and that’s it.

For instance, in the middle of this diversity, what do we find attractive in terms of the present figurative painting, the one that drinks (slakes its thirst) from the neo and trans fountains (neo-expressionism, trans-modernism, neo-neofiguration, bad painting), as a repertoire that could be also traced way behind (through historic avant-gardes)? It’s just like its predecessors: uninhibited, aggressive and arbitrary use of color, formal and thematic freedom. Its appearance, no more and no less. And, nevertheless, not everything shines on… As it could be expected, it’s a kind of painting that doesn’t try to sermonize us –No lecture us, no… No great gestures (despite the taste for gestural stroke), or great ideas (some offer their condolences), since these artists think that there is no need to extol their “genius” through dense topics or their ethnic-politic affiliations, like in past decades.

For nostalgic people, those who always look behind in an effort to find reasons or referents (historiography enthusiasts) and pay attention to avoid being conned, adopting this “new painting” turns out to be a challenge, the painting that is being created these days (starting 5 ago). Historians will take it with skepticism, even if they feel attracted to it, the smell of quote or revived style –which they once learned to admire.

We all know that contexts are imposed, and there are some people who try to explain that content “flippancy” in part of the painting created in the Latin American region, as a reaction to the chronicle-art, politic-art, neoconceptual-art; or insist in taking it as a result of the world we live in: chaotic?, technologic?, interconnected?, superficial?, over-informed?...

The truth is that, during the research process carried by the team of curators from Casa de las Americas as a tribute to its Year of the New Figuration,[ii]I loved the idea of reviewing the different “breakings” of the figurative canon that took place during the last century. It would be bold to say that time has passed, and important signatures and feelings provided very particular visions (and hallucinations), similar doses of beauty and horror, but the painting remained the same, in terms of essence and expressive potential.

Beyond the contexts that skyrocketed Expressionism and Fauvism during the early 20th century; or the postwar period of time, liberation movements all over America and international postcolonial conflicts, the New Figuration was a result of it; or the 1980s that played an important role in the world political balance, when we went from pop to post and there were a lot of neo-this, neo-that…; it all becomes re-reading, not necessarily better or worse than the predecessor, but different. And the myth of the “new” and the “contemporary” surrounds us again, and gets lost among coined phrases and a tricky temporality. Because … how novel was the neo-Mexicanism during the 1980s or the bad painting that irradiated and fascinated so many people in Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile? There are many layers in a hundred years of canon modification and, in spite of the incorporation of aspects from popular culture and the extra-artistic field, it seems to be new … but it isn’t. The irrefutable truth lies in the fact that, when we speak about the work of some present emerging painters, we still use the same terms and adjectives that were applied a century or fifty years ago to characterize (criticize), that kind of emerging and bellicose figuration.

A century has passed away, and the figurative painting comes to us, without any density or drama –although is some cases it can be felt as background–, and it’s specially promoted as something “different” from the previous generation –the 1990s decade. So we appreciate poetics based on the “humanism”, “nostalgia”, “nothing”, “relieve”, the twists and turns of “children memory” and the Me, the “popular”, “eroticism”, the “ephemeral existence”…

There are poetics that stand out in Cuba, like the “new beasts”, which position themselves as disturbing, although their visuality is not that irreverent, most of it.[iii] On the other hand, it’s impossible to get around another group of artists that joined the Cuban promotional (and commercial) circuit, giving priority to the “pleasure” of the pictorial: Alejandro Campins, Carlos Loriaga, Michel Perez (Pollo) and Niels Reyes, just to mention some of them. Each one with a singular saying, in which the pictorial gloating comes out sarcasm, the "enduring just about anything"; where they explore from the small or middle format to the unexpected monumentality of a landscape, for example, to create a sort of mirages.

As for this chromatic “effusiveness”, palimpsest and indiscriminate, we have the outstanding works of Orestes Hernandez and Alberto Lago, in Cuba, or Giovanni Sanchez in Colombia. We can’t forget the neo-pops that, just like Colombian Juan Melo (Gente Brillante series, 2006) or Cuban Osy Milian (Escalera azul, 2010), present a gallery of portraits of “common people”. From Dilsa Jimenez and Andrea Valencia (Colombia), to Mariel Sanhueza (Chile) or Yornel Martinez (Cuba), we find the existential component, experience, which sometimes expresses the social, as accurate referent, pre-text.

It obviously isn’t about impressing anybody, may God save us from it at this point … but seducing, and if it’s possible, making a pact with the viewer, the collector, the curator in a common territory of legitimacy –just as many others did 15 years ago. That’s also valid, of course, though it doesn’t deserve so much stir.

New figuration is not, and I don’t think it tries to be, novel or “breaking-off”. I might be criticized, but the man of this age has to make a living and create, even more if you chose painting as expression. The opposite would be the inertia, abandoning. And these aren’t times to burn the ships... not even remaking them.