Through the eyes of Ulysses: to live in some land with the ghosts of painting
. . . talking about painting already isn’t what
it used to be; once it is acknowledged that it
is a tradition and not technique, painting is thought of as an idea or a way of thinking about itself, about its meaning. The only variable that remains is the term “painting,” which takes on a kaleidoscope of meanings. Thus, everything you say and do related to painting can be considered painting, as the manifestation of an attitude, of taking a position which implies that the artist is constantly reevaluating his place, and questioning himself not only as to why he continues painting but also to what end and how to go forward. In time, painting always implies a new definition.. 1
... in painting, (...) the adventures of the hands, the eyes, the gaze and the body, even though they are different, they are not fundamentally distinct. 2
In Ulysse’s Gaze (1995), the symbolic film, inter-textual and meta-cinematographic- by Teo Angelopoulos, the cinema appears as the documentary refuge of history, concerned with the creative, national, ontological viewpoint. But film itself becomes a disruptive, fragmentary, cyclical narration, full of friction, tension and silence; in which the image ends up being invaded by mist, a thick fog that covers everything, like a veiled memory, perhaps impossible to describe. The filmmaker, who embodies the prototype of the reified homeric hero, tirelessly traveling in search of the meaning of the language through which he is trying to express himself–film–, successively exiled, expatriated, without a home, could be the subject living beyond the appearance of desolation in the paintings of Gustavo Acosta. But we also get the feeling that it may be the artist himself under a magical incantation that leads us to think, construct and represent through painting, in the end, about the endurance of the pictorial method as a choice today. Perhaps the painter will be the last hero who the modern and postmodern monsters get a glimpse of in the last gasps of a tradition that continues to cause turmoil and fury after successive declarations of death.
Could it be that the option to paint does not presuppose a battle in the hyper-real present against the technological mediations that subject our lives to screens, projectors, cameras, and the dizzying zig-zagging in which images are always moving, making them impossible to contemplate and define? Isn’t the surface of a painting in some ways a battle field where we can find a sufficient bit of freedom for some time to rest in the meticulous process of painting? And doesn’t painting renounce the advantages and facilities that technology offers for the construction of a piece, so as not to submit to it and impose limits on the pixels of the image, because it is about experiencing the pleasure of execution, the craft, the fabrication, the artisanal nature that has always been one of its best credentials? The question that imposes itself on us when we view a painting by Gustavo Acosta is to go back to observing without haste, to share the silence that emerges from the metaphysical scenes and quiet urban landscapes that the artist pictures or imagines, the synesthetic experience that must be followed for the painting to become tactile and for us to become aware of its material nature; when we must touch, feel the pigment under our fingers, smell the acrylic and hold our breath to inebriate ourselves like addicts and take our own direction.
Perhaps for this Ulysses, Ithaca cannot be found beyond the heterotopic space of the painting, through the infinite representation of places that are always islands, the panoptic construction that weighs so heavily upon the individual that it begins to crush him with its walls, snuffing out any trace of life in the thousands of windows like those with which the artist fills his cities and buildings. Small black lines that prevent us from seeing beyond, that invert the Renaissance tradition, and far from us approach an illusionist landscape that is in perspective, interfere with colored geometric structures that are perfectly ordered. The placement of these small holes or silent notes appears so rational and balanced, despite the fact that the layers of the painting cover them up, that we feel the presence of a drawing, a line that defines the internal organization that at times gets lost in the overall vision of the work, which is also subject to the expressionist gesture with which Acosta finishes with his life of painting.
If we take our dear Ithaca as a metaphor for home and destiny, a place in the memory that is hidden in the painting, then Ulysses voyage is the pictorial process itself. Have we forgotten the craft of painting, its complexity, the intervention of the hand, the “physical” nature of the pictorial gesture? I don’t believe that an ideal of creation as a divine or romantic construction will be found in these works. We remember that Ulysses rejects the immortality that Calypso offers him. Painting is a life experience that engages the demarcation of time like a rupture from “reality,” from daily operations that keep our organs working. It is an abduction in which the artist is confined in his studio, in a world that makes demands from the canvass. But painting is a process that begins with the simple gesture of constructing an easel, cutting a canvass, stretching it over a frame, affixing the borders of the canvass to a wooden structure. For example, first there is the sketch, then the application, the “mud” and the covering of the surface with broad, free, expressive, brushstrokes to make layers. Finally, what is left is the arduous construction of the details: fragments of color that will soon be covered by other layers and lighter colors, hidden to the eye. Acosta confessed that painting had been a conscious choice in the face of the taste and hegemony of a succession of conceptual trends that have washed over us periodically since the middle of the 20th Century. His style was created at the intersection between academic tradition and its rupture. To continue painting, for him, is possibly a creative choice responding to a need to create far from everything and everyone, to enjoy a private itinerary, a way for him to choose his own pleasures within the historical context in which he was living. It is his journey, a crossing whose form adopts the appearance of the cities that rescue him from the pilgrimage of the eternal exile. His ship is made up of vestiges of pictorial languages that he learned during his artistic education, and in his works we find the transitions between these landscapes that are searched for, found and then lost again.
Nevertheless, despite the distant and solitary appearance of these cities and their architecture, the works reveal their “humanity” in the resources that show their pictorial intention, how they are built, the irrepressible gestures of the subject that is acting on the canvass. The performance is caught in the exercise of the technique, when the line of the sky, the horizon forced into a vertical position in the space between the details of the blocks of apartments or offices, is suggested through fillers and brush strokes that simulate clouds in the background in a grey, tormented climate. And in this night that fills almost the entire composition like a dark abstraction of blues and purples that leave just a space in its lower margin to bring us close to the wall of Malecón 3. This is a recurring theme in the author’s poetic work that shows his concern about the frontier, the limit. Or in the compositions where the tension between the figurative and the abstract is more obvious and redefines the space through the constructive elements of the work, as occurs in these supercharged drawings where the maelstrom of disorganized, chaotic lines laden with graphite, create areas of light and shade, forms that are metamorphosed into natural phenomenon and furiously sweep over an expressionistic and interlaced urban landscape. Like a wave, the lines of graphite swallow the panoptic Bentham drawing of what could be a prison; those that resemble a cloud of dust that is what remains from some skyscrapers that have been brought down, perhaps from an earthquake. The profusion of black and grey lines, like an obsession, an automatism of what is left of the image of a building that has exploded in Apagando os Vestígios I (2009), or a tormented sky that engulfs the houses in Holly Land II (2007); or whose spiral becomes a tornado or the column of black smoke that swallows the control tower and reminds to a certain extent of an incident that occurred during the same year that the work was created, when a control tower at the International Airport in Miami caught fire.
This is the detail that reveals to us that in his travels Gustavo Acosta doesn’t go about blindly, guided by memory or illusion. His eyes are wide open to what is happening around him, to news and the images that he is exposed to as an inhabitant, obligatorily, of this place called the planet Earth, and to the absolutely media dominated global situation. His Ithaca will remain enshrouded in mist and in the middle of this mystery are hidden the references to this universe that is outside the artist’s studio, the everyday morphologies of politics, the economy, ideology, society. Notwithstanding, the pictorial gestures that expand over the support leave an indelible trail of human intervention, of the hand of the painter of this landscape from which he creates his solipsistic view of urban contexts. In this respect, his paintings hide as much as they discover.
Occasionally, the elastic displacement between the figurative and abstract areas within the composition involve the integrity of the work, as in the aerial views of cities, where the urban networks are suggested by lines, stains and dots that cover the entire surface of the painting. As if we clicked on zoom, as we might on Google Maps, in other works the forms become more defined, allowing us to guess the constructive grammar of the city it represents: the streets, the roofs of houses, the silhouettes of buildings, the green of parks, the grey lines that get thicker and turn into winding avenues until we discover the neighborhood of Boyeros 4 in the capital Havana, surrounded by the architectural symbols of modernism which today characterize the power of the State, wedged between its stony walls. In the work of Gustavo Acosta there is a continuous search for balance between the visible and what cannot be seen, because the pictorial fact works to bury it under layers of pigment. The scale sometimes tips toward the pure material side, the solution we call here the “abstract” – being conscious of the impreciseness of the term-; and other times toward figuration, centering on architectonic structures or on precise objects, to the point that you can read the names of places in the neon lights of the city. But, what makes this coming and going between the visual spaces of the city possible? Perhaps the emancipated state of the retina, far from any naturalist or academic pretension, this aesthetic epiphany through which the painting realizes it is free from stigma or the values associated with tradition. There, where the designated painting is called Ithaca, a promise to return home, reunite with an imaginary community, and join with its sense of freedom, of a personal choice where the language is converted into patriotism and follows the individual wherever he may go. The painting comes, therefore, from a heterotopic context where plural knowledge of times and places where the artist has been or that he has read about in stories, in historical and cultural narrations coexists.
Like a wave that keeps coming without end in Acosta’s works, inundating everything, engulfing the Malecón, repeated so many times in his canvasses, the fury of paint destroys everything, submerging it in an acrylic foam, in a mist that challenges the eye of the viewer, reminding him that observation is an act that requires commitment, responsibility and thoroughness. The frame of the painting is an insular border, the drawing an isolated territory, a physical and conceptual limit. Under the passionate appearance of these images, the drawing predefines the pictorial space with mathematical and geometric precision, as a rational exercise that translates the vision of the world to immediately allow it to be ripped out, dilacerated by a need to paint that angrily spits on all mimetic atavism. The pictorial gesture becomes a mnemotecnic procedure, a mechanistic movement of the hand on the support that slips. First the line, the drawing, and later the storm of movement as a way to express with a stain.
There is a peculiarity to the work of Acosta that is found in the transitions of language operating in the use of different formats and supports, when they work with different scales and provide a cold distance from its landscapes which remove every human trace from the composition; or when the dimensions that limit the pictorial space are more involved with the movements of the artists’ arms, without having to move in front of the painting hanging on the wall during the process of creation. In this last case, it seems that the intimacy that the drawing reflects is directly connected with the luck of citation or inclusion of time on the surface of the work through the repeated lines that pass now and again, neurotically, over the same piece of paper. Looking at these drawings we can see, if at the same time we soften our perception, the fruit of synesthetics, we hear the scratching of the pencil on the rough texture of the cardboard. Different from the large pieces, the drawings here concentrate and intensify the fragment; while with the larger pieces the expressivity of the brush strokes denotes their spatial nature spreading itself over the entire extent of the screen.
We can say that in the work of Gustavo Acosta we see a permanent debate between the understanding of painting from the modernists, in regard to the dichotomy between the figurative, realist and naturalist schools, and those expressive options that some will call “spirit.” If this doesn’t seem like much, the functions that are described in their intentions allow them to pursue aesthetic confrontations until the chapter of the optical sensations that give way to impressionism with its emphasis on the perception of colors and light. From the beginnings, none of these guidelines impose a dictatorship on the canvasses from their creator, who uses his technical solutions in a promiscuous manner and as he finds convenient, like a linguistic cannibal. The nocturnal landscape of a city followed by his vision of the dawn have nothing to do with an inclination toward impressionism, despite the fact that the painter confessed to having felt seduced by the repeated colors of the houses in a neighborhood, or by the lights of the city at night, when the city undergoes a radical metamorphosis. In these changes that happen naturally in life, arise the urgency of painting. Of painting that resists the abandonment of the medium in which it is characterized and claims for itself the result of the uncountable ruptures that today elevate its tradition, even coming to create ironies in regard to the possibilities of its own language. Or is it that this blinking of the eye and optical illusion that the artist leaves as semiotic clues deep in the figure that become confused in the composition aren’t playing with our traditional way of seeing? Is it the sky in the back of the composition or object of these pieces where the buildings appear to be cut out? In any case, perhaps the only question that matters is: where to we put ourselves to observe these works? Clearly its not a question of physical space, but ambiguously philosophical and existential. What are the tools we currently have to appreciate the painting of Gustavo Acosta? Obviously they are not a part of the canonical taxonomy of a discipline like the History of Art: genre, style, theme, etc... Unfailingly what remains are our eyes and our sensibility, the desire to listen to the surface of the painting with the voracity of one who is hungry for images that surpass the obscene media frenzy of our saturated visual culture. We must not be afraid to recover something of the splendor that Benjamin pointed to as lost in the era of easy technical reproduction. It is not the anxiety for restitution of the height of mystery in painting in which the hand of the artist is hidden that we will be expelled from this limbo that the everyday handling of images has become in a present of the superimposition of the imaginary, of hyper-reality. Above all, because painting today is more than anything plural and optional. It is not mandatory, but a survivor that negotiates its institutional status and its possibility of happening; that has survived the dogmas of museums and the art market, adapting itself, hiding itself, violating itself and, why not, conforming itself.
Without a doubt, talking about painting leads us to the always disturbing problem inherent to aesthetic thought and artistic practice: the problem of representing, building and determining the position of language within knowledge, and the position of worldly experience once we have overcome the misconception of autonomy, as well as the many departures of the author. The modes of production of contemporary painting reveal how much its operations belong to the present time, as it cohabits with a current ecosystem, working daily with the vital and political demands presented by this universe, which poses itself as an obstacle yet to be represented. In that sense, it is clearly a hybrid, inter-textual painting, leading us outside of the frame and out of the museum, by means of commentaries which question the genealogy of the medium itself. However, it is also a painting that rebuilds itself as a tradition and trade, aware that the journey has ended, that it is not possible to close the circle, in the same way as the protagonist of the Odyssey.
“It is very difficult to talk about painting today, because it is very difficult to see it. In general, painting does not desire exactly to be seen, but to be visually absorbed, to circulate without leaving any trail. It would be, in a certain sense, the simplified aesthetic form of the feasible interchange.” 5
It becomes clear that painting does not, at least not exclusively, guide the telling of stories, and that its narratives are not those that are most consumed by large audiences, completely engaged with the screens which have replaced the old house windows since the end of the 20th century, something lucidly described by Arthur Danto 6. Painting is no longer the epic space where the first vanguards of the 20th century fought the hardest battles against the modes of communication of representation and anecdotal content they had inherited. However, painting still has a vocabulary, a materiality that transforms it into a visible fact, in image, and this specific characteristic of its lexicon makes it, today, more than ever, incomprehensive to the eye which is limited by a vision under the digital paradigm. That means painting also requires unlearning, reverting the dynamics of the super mediated view. On the contrary, as happened to Ulysses upon arriving in Ithaca, we would be lost in the mist, in a thick veil depriving us from the joy of contemplating this place from which we continuously get lost, whose existence we are simply aware of, which we tirelessly go back to, which we remember: the painting.“
But, how do we get to Ithaca.
Gustavo Acosta says he is obsessive in building his work, with the technical procedures that lead him to it, to an end, to a point of contact with the image, but that doesn’t mean that the painting becomes imprisoned. The basic condition we must propose to ourselves, a priori, is to take the journey, to start it at any moment, being assured that it will be a difficult tour, and just may take us nowhere. The route itself is important, and even more important is the decision to perform this quest to the pictorial in order to understand the status of the image nowadays, after centuries of symbolic interchange, evolution and rupture; and also to understand how the painting survives in a state of war and disguises, as a movement made out of seditions whose legibility cannot be restricted to a museum, scripted in the structure left as the heritage of modernity. For some people, this exposition may be an initiation rite, the opportunity to begin at the mercy of circumstances; for others, it may be only a midway station. At any rate, this room, embraced by paint, has the scent of dear Ithaca, as well as acrylics, oils, watercolors and graphite. Ithaca, the painting, is a chimera, a utopia, a promise of what is visible at the end of the journey.
There is the mist, the eternal warning to Ulysses.
Suset Sánchez is a curator and art critic, specialized in contemporary art and visual culture. Born in Cuba, she currently resides in Madrid.
... in painting, (...) the adventures of the hands, the eyes, the gaze and the body, even though they are different, they are not fundamentally distinct. 2
In Ulysse’s Gaze (1995), the symbolic film, inter-textual and meta-cinematographic- by Teo Angelopoulos, the cinema appears as the documentary refuge of history, concerned with the creative, national, ontological viewpoint. But film itself becomes a disruptive, fragmentary, cyclical narration, full of friction, tension and silence; in which the image ends up being invaded by mist, a thick fog that covers everything, like a veiled memory, perhaps impossible to describe. The filmmaker, who embodies the prototype of the reified homeric hero, tirelessly traveling in search of the meaning of the language through which he is trying to express himself–film–, successively exiled, expatriated, without a home, could be the subject living beyond the appearance of desolation in the paintings of Gustavo Acosta. But we also get the feeling that it may be the artist himself under a magical incantation that leads us to think, construct and represent through painting, in the end, about the endurance of the pictorial method as a choice today. Perhaps the painter will be the last hero who the modern and postmodern monsters get a glimpse of in the last gasps of a tradition that continues to cause turmoil and fury after successive declarations of death.
Could it be that the option to paint does not presuppose a battle in the hyper-real present against the technological mediations that subject our lives to screens, projectors, cameras, and the dizzying zig-zagging in which images are always moving, making them impossible to contemplate and define? Isn’t the surface of a painting in some ways a battle field where we can find a sufficient bit of freedom for some time to rest in the meticulous process of painting? And doesn’t painting renounce the advantages and facilities that technology offers for the construction of a piece, so as not to submit to it and impose limits on the pixels of the image, because it is about experiencing the pleasure of execution, the craft, the fabrication, the artisanal nature that has always been one of its best credentials? The question that imposes itself on us when we view a painting by Gustavo Acosta is to go back to observing without haste, to share the silence that emerges from the metaphysical scenes and quiet urban landscapes that the artist pictures or imagines, the synesthetic experience that must be followed for the painting to become tactile and for us to become aware of its material nature; when we must touch, feel the pigment under our fingers, smell the acrylic and hold our breath to inebriate ourselves like addicts and take our own direction.
Perhaps for this Ulysses, Ithaca cannot be found beyond the heterotopic space of the painting, through the infinite representation of places that are always islands, the panoptic construction that weighs so heavily upon the individual that it begins to crush him with its walls, snuffing out any trace of life in the thousands of windows like those with which the artist fills his cities and buildings. Small black lines that prevent us from seeing beyond, that invert the Renaissance tradition, and far from us approach an illusionist landscape that is in perspective, interfere with colored geometric structures that are perfectly ordered. The placement of these small holes or silent notes appears so rational and balanced, despite the fact that the layers of the painting cover them up, that we feel the presence of a drawing, a line that defines the internal organization that at times gets lost in the overall vision of the work, which is also subject to the expressionist gesture with which Acosta finishes with his life of painting.
If we take our dear Ithaca as a metaphor for home and destiny, a place in the memory that is hidden in the painting, then Ulysses voyage is the pictorial process itself. Have we forgotten the craft of painting, its complexity, the intervention of the hand, the “physical” nature of the pictorial gesture? I don’t believe that an ideal of creation as a divine or romantic construction will be found in these works. We remember that Ulysses rejects the immortality that Calypso offers him. Painting is a life experience that engages the demarcation of time like a rupture from “reality,” from daily operations that keep our organs working. It is an abduction in which the artist is confined in his studio, in a world that makes demands from the canvass. But painting is a process that begins with the simple gesture of constructing an easel, cutting a canvass, stretching it over a frame, affixing the borders of the canvass to a wooden structure. For example, first there is the sketch, then the application, the “mud” and the covering of the surface with broad, free, expressive, brushstrokes to make layers. Finally, what is left is the arduous construction of the details: fragments of color that will soon be covered by other layers and lighter colors, hidden to the eye. Acosta confessed that painting had been a conscious choice in the face of the taste and hegemony of a succession of conceptual trends that have washed over us periodically since the middle of the 20th Century. His style was created at the intersection between academic tradition and its rupture. To continue painting, for him, is possibly a creative choice responding to a need to create far from everything and everyone, to enjoy a private itinerary, a way for him to choose his own pleasures within the historical context in which he was living. It is his journey, a crossing whose form adopts the appearance of the cities that rescue him from the pilgrimage of the eternal exile. His ship is made up of vestiges of pictorial languages that he learned during his artistic education, and in his works we find the transitions between these landscapes that are searched for, found and then lost again.
Nevertheless, despite the distant and solitary appearance of these cities and their architecture, the works reveal their “humanity” in the resources that show their pictorial intention, how they are built, the irrepressible gestures of the subject that is acting on the canvass. The performance is caught in the exercise of the technique, when the line of the sky, the horizon forced into a vertical position in the space between the details of the blocks of apartments or offices, is suggested through fillers and brush strokes that simulate clouds in the background in a grey, tormented climate. And in this night that fills almost the entire composition like a dark abstraction of blues and purples that leave just a space in its lower margin to bring us close to the wall of Malecón 3. This is a recurring theme in the author’s poetic work that shows his concern about the frontier, the limit. Or in the compositions where the tension between the figurative and the abstract is more obvious and redefines the space through the constructive elements of the work, as occurs in these supercharged drawings where the maelstrom of disorganized, chaotic lines laden with graphite, create areas of light and shade, forms that are metamorphosed into natural phenomenon and furiously sweep over an expressionistic and interlaced urban landscape. Like a wave, the lines of graphite swallow the panoptic Bentham drawing of what could be a prison; those that resemble a cloud of dust that is what remains from some skyscrapers that have been brought down, perhaps from an earthquake. The profusion of black and grey lines, like an obsession, an automatism of what is left of the image of a building that has exploded in Apagando os Vestígios I (2009), or a tormented sky that engulfs the houses in Holly Land II (2007); or whose spiral becomes a tornado or the column of black smoke that swallows the control tower and reminds to a certain extent of an incident that occurred during the same year that the work was created, when a control tower at the International Airport in Miami caught fire.
This is the detail that reveals to us that in his travels Gustavo Acosta doesn’t go about blindly, guided by memory or illusion. His eyes are wide open to what is happening around him, to news and the images that he is exposed to as an inhabitant, obligatorily, of this place called the planet Earth, and to the absolutely media dominated global situation. His Ithaca will remain enshrouded in mist and in the middle of this mystery are hidden the references to this universe that is outside the artist’s studio, the everyday morphologies of politics, the economy, ideology, society. Notwithstanding, the pictorial gestures that expand over the support leave an indelible trail of human intervention, of the hand of the painter of this landscape from which he creates his solipsistic view of urban contexts. In this respect, his paintings hide as much as they discover.
Occasionally, the elastic displacement between the figurative and abstract areas within the composition involve the integrity of the work, as in the aerial views of cities, where the urban networks are suggested by lines, stains and dots that cover the entire surface of the painting. As if we clicked on zoom, as we might on Google Maps, in other works the forms become more defined, allowing us to guess the constructive grammar of the city it represents: the streets, the roofs of houses, the silhouettes of buildings, the green of parks, the grey lines that get thicker and turn into winding avenues until we discover the neighborhood of Boyeros 4 in the capital Havana, surrounded by the architectural symbols of modernism which today characterize the power of the State, wedged between its stony walls. In the work of Gustavo Acosta there is a continuous search for balance between the visible and what cannot be seen, because the pictorial fact works to bury it under layers of pigment. The scale sometimes tips toward the pure material side, the solution we call here the “abstract” – being conscious of the impreciseness of the term-; and other times toward figuration, centering on architectonic structures or on precise objects, to the point that you can read the names of places in the neon lights of the city. But, what makes this coming and going between the visual spaces of the city possible? Perhaps the emancipated state of the retina, far from any naturalist or academic pretension, this aesthetic epiphany through which the painting realizes it is free from stigma or the values associated with tradition. There, where the designated painting is called Ithaca, a promise to return home, reunite with an imaginary community, and join with its sense of freedom, of a personal choice where the language is converted into patriotism and follows the individual wherever he may go. The painting comes, therefore, from a heterotopic context where plural knowledge of times and places where the artist has been or that he has read about in stories, in historical and cultural narrations coexists.
Like a wave that keeps coming without end in Acosta’s works, inundating everything, engulfing the Malecón, repeated so many times in his canvasses, the fury of paint destroys everything, submerging it in an acrylic foam, in a mist that challenges the eye of the viewer, reminding him that observation is an act that requires commitment, responsibility and thoroughness. The frame of the painting is an insular border, the drawing an isolated territory, a physical and conceptual limit. Under the passionate appearance of these images, the drawing predefines the pictorial space with mathematical and geometric precision, as a rational exercise that translates the vision of the world to immediately allow it to be ripped out, dilacerated by a need to paint that angrily spits on all mimetic atavism. The pictorial gesture becomes a mnemotecnic procedure, a mechanistic movement of the hand on the support that slips. First the line, the drawing, and later the storm of movement as a way to express with a stain.
There is a peculiarity to the work of Acosta that is found in the transitions of language operating in the use of different formats and supports, when they work with different scales and provide a cold distance from its landscapes which remove every human trace from the composition; or when the dimensions that limit the pictorial space are more involved with the movements of the artists’ arms, without having to move in front of the painting hanging on the wall during the process of creation. In this last case, it seems that the intimacy that the drawing reflects is directly connected with the luck of citation or inclusion of time on the surface of the work through the repeated lines that pass now and again, neurotically, over the same piece of paper. Looking at these drawings we can see, if at the same time we soften our perception, the fruit of synesthetics, we hear the scratching of the pencil on the rough texture of the cardboard. Different from the large pieces, the drawings here concentrate and intensify the fragment; while with the larger pieces the expressivity of the brush strokes denotes their spatial nature spreading itself over the entire extent of the screen.
We can say that in the work of Gustavo Acosta we see a permanent debate between the understanding of painting from the modernists, in regard to the dichotomy between the figurative, realist and naturalist schools, and those expressive options that some will call “spirit.” If this doesn’t seem like much, the functions that are described in their intentions allow them to pursue aesthetic confrontations until the chapter of the optical sensations that give way to impressionism with its emphasis on the perception of colors and light. From the beginnings, none of these guidelines impose a dictatorship on the canvasses from their creator, who uses his technical solutions in a promiscuous manner and as he finds convenient, like a linguistic cannibal. The nocturnal landscape of a city followed by his vision of the dawn have nothing to do with an inclination toward impressionism, despite the fact that the painter confessed to having felt seduced by the repeated colors of the houses in a neighborhood, or by the lights of the city at night, when the city undergoes a radical metamorphosis. In these changes that happen naturally in life, arise the urgency of painting. Of painting that resists the abandonment of the medium in which it is characterized and claims for itself the result of the uncountable ruptures that today elevate its tradition, even coming to create ironies in regard to the possibilities of its own language. Or is it that this blinking of the eye and optical illusion that the artist leaves as semiotic clues deep in the figure that become confused in the composition aren’t playing with our traditional way of seeing? Is it the sky in the back of the composition or object of these pieces where the buildings appear to be cut out? In any case, perhaps the only question that matters is: where to we put ourselves to observe these works? Clearly its not a question of physical space, but ambiguously philosophical and existential. What are the tools we currently have to appreciate the painting of Gustavo Acosta? Obviously they are not a part of the canonical taxonomy of a discipline like the History of Art: genre, style, theme, etc... Unfailingly what remains are our eyes and our sensibility, the desire to listen to the surface of the painting with the voracity of one who is hungry for images that surpass the obscene media frenzy of our saturated visual culture. We must not be afraid to recover something of the splendor that Benjamin pointed to as lost in the era of easy technical reproduction. It is not the anxiety for restitution of the height of mystery in painting in which the hand of the artist is hidden that we will be expelled from this limbo that the everyday handling of images has become in a present of the superimposition of the imaginary, of hyper-reality. Above all, because painting today is more than anything plural and optional. It is not mandatory, but a survivor that negotiates its institutional status and its possibility of happening; that has survived the dogmas of museums and the art market, adapting itself, hiding itself, violating itself and, why not, conforming itself.
Without a doubt, talking about painting leads us to the always disturbing problem inherent to aesthetic thought and artistic practice: the problem of representing, building and determining the position of language within knowledge, and the position of worldly experience once we have overcome the misconception of autonomy, as well as the many departures of the author. The modes of production of contemporary painting reveal how much its operations belong to the present time, as it cohabits with a current ecosystem, working daily with the vital and political demands presented by this universe, which poses itself as an obstacle yet to be represented. In that sense, it is clearly a hybrid, inter-textual painting, leading us outside of the frame and out of the museum, by means of commentaries which question the genealogy of the medium itself. However, it is also a painting that rebuilds itself as a tradition and trade, aware that the journey has ended, that it is not possible to close the circle, in the same way as the protagonist of the Odyssey.
“It is very difficult to talk about painting today, because it is very difficult to see it. In general, painting does not desire exactly to be seen, but to be visually absorbed, to circulate without leaving any trail. It would be, in a certain sense, the simplified aesthetic form of the feasible interchange.” 5
It becomes clear that painting does not, at least not exclusively, guide the telling of stories, and that its narratives are not those that are most consumed by large audiences, completely engaged with the screens which have replaced the old house windows since the end of the 20th century, something lucidly described by Arthur Danto 6. Painting is no longer the epic space where the first vanguards of the 20th century fought the hardest battles against the modes of communication of representation and anecdotal content they had inherited. However, painting still has a vocabulary, a materiality that transforms it into a visible fact, in image, and this specific characteristic of its lexicon makes it, today, more than ever, incomprehensive to the eye which is limited by a vision under the digital paradigm. That means painting also requires unlearning, reverting the dynamics of the super mediated view. On the contrary, as happened to Ulysses upon arriving in Ithaca, we would be lost in the mist, in a thick veil depriving us from the joy of contemplating this place from which we continuously get lost, whose existence we are simply aware of, which we tirelessly go back to, which we remember: the painting.“
But, how do we get to Ithaca.
Gustavo Acosta says he is obsessive in building his work, with the technical procedures that lead him to it, to an end, to a point of contact with the image, but that doesn’t mean that the painting becomes imprisoned. The basic condition we must propose to ourselves, a priori, is to take the journey, to start it at any moment, being assured that it will be a difficult tour, and just may take us nowhere. The route itself is important, and even more important is the decision to perform this quest to the pictorial in order to understand the status of the image nowadays, after centuries of symbolic interchange, evolution and rupture; and also to understand how the painting survives in a state of war and disguises, as a movement made out of seditions whose legibility cannot be restricted to a museum, scripted in the structure left as the heritage of modernity. For some people, this exposition may be an initiation rite, the opportunity to begin at the mercy of circumstances; for others, it may be only a midway station. At any rate, this room, embraced by paint, has the scent of dear Ithaca, as well as acrylics, oils, watercolors and graphite. Ithaca, the painting, is a chimera, a utopia, a promise of what is visible at the end of the journey.
There is the mist, the eternal warning to Ulysses.
Suset Sánchez is a curator and art critic, specialized in contemporary art and visual culture. Born in Cuba, she currently resides in Madrid.
1. Barro, David, “Un puñado de razones de por qué la pintura no se secó”, in Castillo, Omar- Pascual (ed.), On Painting [prácticas pictóricas actuales... más allá de la pintura o más acá], Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 2013, p. 159.
2. Aumont, Jacques, “El ojo, la mano y el espíritu”, in La estética hoy, Madrid, Cátedra, 2001, p. 37.
3. Malecón is the name of the famous avenue in Havana which runs 8km along the coast in the northern part of the Cuban Capital , with a long seawall.
4. Boyeros is a region of Havana district, Cuba.
5. Baudrillard, Jean, “Ilusión y desilusión estética”, in Letra internacional, Madrid, No. 39, 1995, p. 17.
6. Danto, Arthur, “Pintura, política y arte posthistórico”, in Después del fin del arte: El arte contemporáneo y el linde de la historia, Barcelona, Paidós, 1999, pp. 159-175.
2. Aumont, Jacques, “El ojo, la mano y el espíritu”, in La estética hoy, Madrid, Cátedra, 2001, p. 37.
3. Malecón is the name of the famous avenue in Havana which runs 8km along the coast in the northern part of the Cuban Capital , with a long seawall.
4. Boyeros is a region of Havana district, Cuba.
5. Baudrillard, Jean, “Ilusión y desilusión estética”, in Letra internacional, Madrid, No. 39, 1995, p. 17.
6. Danto, Arthur, “Pintura, política y arte posthistórico”, in Después del fin del arte: El arte contemporáneo y el linde de la historia, Barcelona, Paidós, 1999, pp. 159-175.
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