New Support Strengthens Your Speech
By Ángel Alonso
Since the beginning, human beings have never stopped moving around the planet. Migrations have shaped the current face of the world, driven by a multiplicity of historical, economic, political and social factors.
Behind the very different and specific personal dramas, there are common factors in the experience of migrants; one of them is the fragmentation that an individual suffers when the development of his natural evolution is interrupted. He loses, when changing context, that protective network he enjoyed in his comfort zone, formed by family, friends and memories, but also by specific smells, temperatures to which he has adapted since childhood… and even the things that may bother him most in his country, such as the noises to which he has become accustomed (for example) constitute, psychologically, a sensation of affection for his ear.
Arbelio Fontes Rodríguez (Camaguey, 1973) has been developing for many years an infinite series called Exodus, the original title of the biblical text that narrates the story of the people of Israel abandoning slavery in Egypt. If we want to approach Fontes’ Exodus, and we want to understand its conceptual basis, we must pay attention to one of the most useful factors to understand a work of art: its context. Is it about establishing a parallel between the search for freedom today and that flight led by Moses?
I think it goes far beyond that; it possesses, in the pictorial sense, a peculiarity that goes beyond any simple explanation, any comfortable answer. Here the execution of the work is as important as the story that serves as a pretext, let us observe the way in which he resolves the figures, his level of synthesis. Fontes makes us see in our mind what he did not physically paint, but what he suggested; he makes us read as figuration a series of abstract stains, and that curious optical effect is what really attracts us.
I’m not saying that the subject matter and the implications it may have as a social discourse are not important, I’m just trying to make us pay attention to what is happening here in the plastic sense and that in the end ends up being what defines it. Because in the visual arts the real weight, whatever they say, is not in what you say but in how you say it. Especially in these last paintings, in which the background has a material qualitythat makes them much more expressive.
The act of painting on the burlap surface not only gives these pieces a very particular beauty, but also influences the interpretative possibilities, as we already know that the material chosen by the artist is one of the elements that most loads the concept of a work1. The change from the white canvas to this other support imprints a greater strength to his paintings, it encloses a very different attitude to that of painting on the neat white, because it implies a negation to a convention, it implies an opposition to a guarantee.
His “human landscapes” have the power to attract not only our gaze but also our thoughts, and of course, those of us who most identify with his work are the emigrants. And we identify precisely because it is not a catastrophic vision of the act of emigrating; here the walks are serene, natural.
Neither sharks attacking rafters nor wire fences crossed under bullets. His figures are simply walking, just as a school of fish swims in the sea or as flocks of birds move in the sky. It is this naturalness that amazes us, because it does not pass judgment or judge the migrant, it only represents these massive displacements in which one’s own personality is annulled to become part of a collective.
Arbelio Fontes’ new paintings constitute a leap in the definition of his increasingly personal artistic discourse. The use of this new support is a contribution to the fact that his work constitutes a voice of its own within the vast panorama of Cuban art.
1. On the content that emanates from the material in which the work of art is made, Thomas McEvilley expresses himself thus in his text: On the Manner, of Addressing Clouds:
“They are pronouncements of judgment that the viewer grasps immediately, even without necessarily thinking of them as content. They are statements of affiliation with, or alienation from, certain areas of cultural tradition, as say, the use of certain industrial techniques represents a celebration or at least an acceptance of urban industrial culture, and the use of marble or ceramics suggests nostalgia for the world before the Industrial Revolution”.

