FRAGMENTS OF THE CITY AND OTHER MOTIFS
The city is one of the most automatic visual referents for individuals who live it—or suffer it. Buildings, streets, traffic signals, and the whole scaffolding of objects that comprise the city appear as neutral signs by the very fact of their practical utility: to orient and to serve as points of reference. In this way, those who traverse the city day after day lose the ability to be surprised by the shapes, colors, and visual suggestions that coexist in the spaces we have all passed through with urgency at some point, on our way somewhere else. In our everyday lives, the city is a use value rather than an object of contemplation.
But that which in daily life is neutral in terms of significance, in art becomes necessarily charged with meaning. The very fact of isolating a certain slice of reality on a given support, the very fact of framing it, taking it out of its context, and translating it for our perception by means of an artistic language, is enough to situate us in a different semantic perspective: that from which we are interrogated or provoked so that we admit that the constructed image carries a meaning that goes beyond its immediate appearance. This simple communicational certitude is the basis for a possible interpretation of Gustavo Acosta’s work.
Reality and Memory
Gustavo Acosta plays with appearance, questions codes of perception, and creates visual atmospheres where fragments of the city or interior views resemble the stage montages of an actorless mise en scène. We are, undoubtedly, in the presence of an extraordinary draftsman who achieves in his painting a suggestive balance between the orthodoxy of the figurative tradition and the challenges of contemporary visual language. His themes are traditional, and so is the careful craftsmanship displayed in pictorial works of such an exquisite finish. In turn, his plastic and conceptual resources are contemporary and they allow Acosta to gain distance from the object’s immediacy and to produce a new image incorporating pictorial conventions from the expressive arsenals of abstract art, expressionism, informalism, photography, and popular graphic arts.
Acosta’s imaginary archive is filled with symbolic visions of architecture, of public spaces, and of interior locations, all of them heavily marked by a photographic perspective in their “framing” and the “angle of the shot.” Although in the mid 1980s Acosta began to move away from photography as a direct referent and started on a more symbolic path—re-elaborating images and using texts on the works, for example—his approach to reality permanently assumes photographic characteristics such as the “presence effect” and a specific way of articulating compositional tensions. From the general planes to the close-ups, a vision predominates that encourages us to think that those realities were already there, independent of the artist’s intentions. However, the image’s true origin is most often a prior drawing, a re-elaboration of previous representations, or simply a productive use of memory. Since his beginnings as a painter, Acosta understood each painting as a fact taken from reality, as an archaeological document contributing new data about the represented or evoked object. This analytical position regarding the art of painting helps explain the rationality of Acosta’s compositions and the rigor of the linear perspective that organizes his spaces in depth. In these archaeological simulacra, objects are represented in a descriptive way, placing subjectivity in parenthesis. Unlike critics who have wanted to find a touch of irony in Acosta’s work, I tend to think that his posture instead resembles classical positivism, a positivism disinclined to produce value judgments about reality, a positivism that would rather display the facts of observation or memory without the interference of passion. At the very least, this descriptive intention seems to me one of the fundamental aspects of Acosta’s work.
Each element in these works—buildings, streets, sky, and vegetation—reveals a painstaking compositional study and an emphasis on detail. Yet at the same time that rationality of execution is complemented by an atmosphere of premonition or mystery in which emotions, as an attitude towards what is represented, are contained or diluted in the symbolism of the forms. Perhaps this is what Acosta meant when he told me of “the cooling down of expression” in his work and of his proximity to the Symbolists; it is not, in this case, the coldness of conceptualism but rather, a containment of the emotional that is present in the work in a highly intellectualized way. Unlike other Cuban painters who have sublimated or idealized the nature of the island or their city’s physical environment, Gustavo Acosta rationalizes his affective memory in a suggestive combination of pictorial motifs. In works like Ideal (2002), we find elements of estrangement with a surrealist tone, like a cypress capriciously located in the middle of Havana’s malecón. In a way, this is the artist’s “subjective” presence, externalized by means of a symbol—the cypress—that taken out of its natural context seems to embody the very idea of rootlessness.
Gone with the Wind
This rootlessness begins in Mexico in 1991, a very active year for Gustavo Acosta in terms of exhibitions, participation in biennials, and awards. In Mexico City, the artist tells us, he became interested in colonial painting, in some of the great muralists, and in popular painting, which gave him a new kind of sensibility for colors, textures, and the treatment of details in formal solutions. In Spain (1992–1993), Acosta began a series of works on objects that functioned as a parenthesis in his exploration of urban themes. It is what he calls the “object enchantment,” a series devoted to pre-technological tools, in which we perceive a painstaking elaboration of surfaces in paintings such as El cuento (The Tale, 1993), a piece that seems like the dramatized illustration of a story of revenge and death.
After this parenthesis, Gustavo Acosta settled in Miami and returned with greater strength to the urban world with the archetypal buildings and other iconographic constants such as roller coasters, zeppelin aircrafts, airports, or circular letters from the Isla de Pinos prison in Cuba, which have marked his work so profoundly.
Gustavo Acosta’s painting brings together the rigor of the line and a measured use of color with high contrasts of light and shadows that give his representations a telluric solidity and, at the same time, an existential mystery. This mystery is related, in my mind, to the conceptual proximity of those images to the ruins, to the testimony of silence and majesty of what once was an intimate habitat or an everyday space of transit and today remains a desolate space in memory. That is, at least, the impression left on me by most of his works on the theme of Havana’s architecture. If there is a nostalgic element in these works, it is a peculiar nostalgia, devoid of traces of longing and of the idealization of remembrance, and filled instead by spaces no one crosses, as if an autumnal wind had swept away any manifestation of life.
The lack of human referents is a constant in Gustavo Acosta’s oeuvre. His reading of an urban space centered on archetypal buildings and symbols of power, seems to propose a reified vision of human relations. Aunque no es cisne ni canta (Even though it is not a Swan and it does not Sing, 2003) is a paradigmatic piece in that respect: the cypress, or perhaps emigrant, in the painting’s foreground contrasts compositionally and conceptually with what has become, paradoxically, a symbol of totalitarianism in the island, the monument to José Martí in Revolution Square. Undoubtedly, a human presence is not necessary in order to unveil a human content. In some of Acosta’s interiors, the human figure is an irrelevant fact, cut by the composition in such a way that it does not become a subjective presence in a strict sense, but only one more element in the scene. The existential side of this work resides precisely in its negation of human presence. The Dimension of Silence Scale of representation is an important part of the meaning of this artist’s painting. Beyond each piece’s specific dimensions, the real or suggested scale is almost always monumental; hence, perhaps, Acosta’s preference for large formats. In my view, the dimensions of the compositional space allow Acosta to display more efficiently his pictorial resources, such as the scratching of the painting’s surface, the arrangement of lights and shadows, or his work with textures. Similarly, it seems to me that the symbolic character of Acosta’s images achieves greater aesthetic and dramatic productivity the more it approaches a real scene.
The effect of estrangement—identification and distancing— that these images provoke in us is the creative result of the way in which Acosta combines representation and the art of subverting it through the use of diverse artistic resources, awakening in the viewer the need to reconstruct those two planes of articulation in a single perceptual experience. Gustavo Acosta’s work began to appear in Havana in the 1980s, at a moment when questioning the language of art, its traditional supports, and the social function of art itself was a way of dispelling cultural inertia and establishing a new artistic field. In the context of exploration, Gustavo Acosta assumed a creative position that appealed to the always-open potential of figurativism and bi-dimensionality. But that salvaging of tradition carried the same meaning as his appropriation of memories: these are the bases for a re[de]construction of reality, and offer a wide margin for interpretation and aesthetic enjoyment. And that is one of the central characteristics of Acosta’s work: mastery and craftsmanship in the execution of the image, and his ability to motivate reflection about time and about the human condition from the inexhaustible space of his memory.
Jorge de la Fuente, 2003.
But that which in daily life is neutral in terms of significance, in art becomes necessarily charged with meaning. The very fact of isolating a certain slice of reality on a given support, the very fact of framing it, taking it out of its context, and translating it for our perception by means of an artistic language, is enough to situate us in a different semantic perspective: that from which we are interrogated or provoked so that we admit that the constructed image carries a meaning that goes beyond its immediate appearance. This simple communicational certitude is the basis for a possible interpretation of Gustavo Acosta’s work.
Reality and Memory
Gustavo Acosta plays with appearance, questions codes of perception, and creates visual atmospheres where fragments of the city or interior views resemble the stage montages of an actorless mise en scène. We are, undoubtedly, in the presence of an extraordinary draftsman who achieves in his painting a suggestive balance between the orthodoxy of the figurative tradition and the challenges of contemporary visual language. His themes are traditional, and so is the careful craftsmanship displayed in pictorial works of such an exquisite finish. In turn, his plastic and conceptual resources are contemporary and they allow Acosta to gain distance from the object’s immediacy and to produce a new image incorporating pictorial conventions from the expressive arsenals of abstract art, expressionism, informalism, photography, and popular graphic arts.
Acosta’s imaginary archive is filled with symbolic visions of architecture, of public spaces, and of interior locations, all of them heavily marked by a photographic perspective in their “framing” and the “angle of the shot.” Although in the mid 1980s Acosta began to move away from photography as a direct referent and started on a more symbolic path—re-elaborating images and using texts on the works, for example—his approach to reality permanently assumes photographic characteristics such as the “presence effect” and a specific way of articulating compositional tensions. From the general planes to the close-ups, a vision predominates that encourages us to think that those realities were already there, independent of the artist’s intentions. However, the image’s true origin is most often a prior drawing, a re-elaboration of previous representations, or simply a productive use of memory. Since his beginnings as a painter, Acosta understood each painting as a fact taken from reality, as an archaeological document contributing new data about the represented or evoked object. This analytical position regarding the art of painting helps explain the rationality of Acosta’s compositions and the rigor of the linear perspective that organizes his spaces in depth. In these archaeological simulacra, objects are represented in a descriptive way, placing subjectivity in parenthesis. Unlike critics who have wanted to find a touch of irony in Acosta’s work, I tend to think that his posture instead resembles classical positivism, a positivism disinclined to produce value judgments about reality, a positivism that would rather display the facts of observation or memory without the interference of passion. At the very least, this descriptive intention seems to me one of the fundamental aspects of Acosta’s work.
Each element in these works—buildings, streets, sky, and vegetation—reveals a painstaking compositional study and an emphasis on detail. Yet at the same time that rationality of execution is complemented by an atmosphere of premonition or mystery in which emotions, as an attitude towards what is represented, are contained or diluted in the symbolism of the forms. Perhaps this is what Acosta meant when he told me of “the cooling down of expression” in his work and of his proximity to the Symbolists; it is not, in this case, the coldness of conceptualism but rather, a containment of the emotional that is present in the work in a highly intellectualized way. Unlike other Cuban painters who have sublimated or idealized the nature of the island or their city’s physical environment, Gustavo Acosta rationalizes his affective memory in a suggestive combination of pictorial motifs. In works like Ideal (2002), we find elements of estrangement with a surrealist tone, like a cypress capriciously located in the middle of Havana’s malecón. In a way, this is the artist’s “subjective” presence, externalized by means of a symbol—the cypress—that taken out of its natural context seems to embody the very idea of rootlessness.
Gone with the Wind
This rootlessness begins in Mexico in 1991, a very active year for Gustavo Acosta in terms of exhibitions, participation in biennials, and awards. In Mexico City, the artist tells us, he became interested in colonial painting, in some of the great muralists, and in popular painting, which gave him a new kind of sensibility for colors, textures, and the treatment of details in formal solutions. In Spain (1992–1993), Acosta began a series of works on objects that functioned as a parenthesis in his exploration of urban themes. It is what he calls the “object enchantment,” a series devoted to pre-technological tools, in which we perceive a painstaking elaboration of surfaces in paintings such as El cuento (The Tale, 1993), a piece that seems like the dramatized illustration of a story of revenge and death.
After this parenthesis, Gustavo Acosta settled in Miami and returned with greater strength to the urban world with the archetypal buildings and other iconographic constants such as roller coasters, zeppelin aircrafts, airports, or circular letters from the Isla de Pinos prison in Cuba, which have marked his work so profoundly.
Gustavo Acosta’s painting brings together the rigor of the line and a measured use of color with high contrasts of light and shadows that give his representations a telluric solidity and, at the same time, an existential mystery. This mystery is related, in my mind, to the conceptual proximity of those images to the ruins, to the testimony of silence and majesty of what once was an intimate habitat or an everyday space of transit and today remains a desolate space in memory. That is, at least, the impression left on me by most of his works on the theme of Havana’s architecture. If there is a nostalgic element in these works, it is a peculiar nostalgia, devoid of traces of longing and of the idealization of remembrance, and filled instead by spaces no one crosses, as if an autumnal wind had swept away any manifestation of life.
The lack of human referents is a constant in Gustavo Acosta’s oeuvre. His reading of an urban space centered on archetypal buildings and symbols of power, seems to propose a reified vision of human relations. Aunque no es cisne ni canta (Even though it is not a Swan and it does not Sing, 2003) is a paradigmatic piece in that respect: the cypress, or perhaps emigrant, in the painting’s foreground contrasts compositionally and conceptually with what has become, paradoxically, a symbol of totalitarianism in the island, the monument to José Martí in Revolution Square. Undoubtedly, a human presence is not necessary in order to unveil a human content. In some of Acosta’s interiors, the human figure is an irrelevant fact, cut by the composition in such a way that it does not become a subjective presence in a strict sense, but only one more element in the scene. The existential side of this work resides precisely in its negation of human presence. The Dimension of Silence Scale of representation is an important part of the meaning of this artist’s painting. Beyond each piece’s specific dimensions, the real or suggested scale is almost always monumental; hence, perhaps, Acosta’s preference for large formats. In my view, the dimensions of the compositional space allow Acosta to display more efficiently his pictorial resources, such as the scratching of the painting’s surface, the arrangement of lights and shadows, or his work with textures. Similarly, it seems to me that the symbolic character of Acosta’s images achieves greater aesthetic and dramatic productivity the more it approaches a real scene.
The effect of estrangement—identification and distancing— that these images provoke in us is the creative result of the way in which Acosta combines representation and the art of subverting it through the use of diverse artistic resources, awakening in the viewer the need to reconstruct those two planes of articulation in a single perceptual experience. Gustavo Acosta’s work began to appear in Havana in the 1980s, at a moment when questioning the language of art, its traditional supports, and the social function of art itself was a way of dispelling cultural inertia and establishing a new artistic field. In the context of exploration, Gustavo Acosta assumed a creative position that appealed to the always-open potential of figurativism and bi-dimensionality. But that salvaging of tradition carried the same meaning as his appropriation of memories: these are the bases for a re[de]construction of reality, and offer a wide margin for interpretation and aesthetic enjoyment. And that is one of the central characteristics of Acosta’s work: mastery and craftsmanship in the execution of the image, and his ability to motivate reflection about time and about the human condition from the inexhaustible space of his memory.
Jorge de la Fuente, 2003.
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