LEZAMAR
LEZAMAR:
“UN CARACOL NOCTURNO EN UN RECTÁNGULO DE AGUA”
Eighteen years have passed since my first solo exhibition, Poems of Light, a proposal influenced by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the spaces of San Francis. At that time, I sought a mimesis with the verses of the American poet, driven by her obsession with making the word and the poem be, rather than signify; where the unsaid, the blank spaces, insinuation, and ambiguity attain in discourse as much value as the explicit.
Without having entirely left behind these ways of understanding what painting is for me, I arrive at Lezamar, “to make in the manner of Lezama,” which is: how the hypertelic* path of the image crosses the mirror of Aristotelian causality to shape the invisible space, thanks to a baroque simultaneity, within a spider’s web.
Lezama Lima, a Cuban poet and sovereign of the most absolute hermeticism, transforms the word into image in order to decontextualize it: he uses the image to rid himself of the signifying necessity of the word, which is thus freed to communicate a reality of its own invention. In Lezama’s words: “Since true nature has been lost, according to Pascal, everything can be nature. My aim is to replace nature with image.” (Lezama performs a Malévich).
In Lezamar, using color in the suprematist** sense of the term—structuring and consolidating the pictorial work—is the hypertelic path, “the act that overcomes all determinism to go beyond its purpose.”
When, in observing one of the paintings, a blue stain becomes a whale swimming in the ocean depths, that is the oblique experience. In the Cuban painter’s words: “What I like and what surprises me are the unheard-of tangencies of the world of the senses, what I have called the oblique experience, when the ringing of the telephone gives me the same sensation as contemplating an octopus in a Minoan jar.”
The sweatings I reproduce in my works are the formation of a quantum space, of being here while being there, which is nothing other than the baroque as used by Lezama as a space of simultaneities. “For me, the baroque is a very much our condition, a very American condition. I would say that two elements define the conditions of our baroque: simultaneity—that is, what for Europeans is successive is for the American simultaneous, producing a turbulence in thought.”
All of this is governed by the space of the spider: “the spider creates a space that is the electricity of the key, its communication with the invisible space, and that realm is superior to that of man, because it secretes and elaborates it itself. Man, too, must secrete his own space.”
Lezamar is, in this exhibition, a traversal of Lezama’s paths in order to configure our own creative space. My ambition is for this exhibition to evoke in viewers what Lezama admired in a writer: “That he command forces that carry him away, that seem as if they will destroy him. That he seize that challenge and dissolve resistance. That he destroy language and create language. That by day he have no past and by night be millenary. That he delight in the pomegranate he has never tasted and in the guava he tastes every day. That he approach things through appetite and withdraw through repulsion.”
Cristóbal Ortega
*Hypertelia: Excessive development of an organ causing it to lose its function. For example, the tusks of the mammoth.
**Suprematist: in Malévich’s concept, which advocates for a fully pure painting; painting is a means of constructing new forms.
Note: the bold quotations belong to conversations of Lezama in the book Thus Spoke Lezama Lima (Ciro Bianchi Ross), Sur Collection, 2010.
