Place of Land and Mind
By Mónica Pérez
Russian artist and art teacher Pavel Chistyakov (1832-1919) once declared that “all that is hardest, bravest and noblest in art is expressed through drawing.” Regardless of the context in which the master made such a statement, his words lay bare the limpid and bold nature of the art of strokes and lines. In addition to the plainness that chromatic restraint generates, together with the freedom of the line that can move from the casual to the exquisite, something else in drawing holds the weight of manifesting “…the hardest, bravest and noblest…” And it is its primal force, that cognitive-cultural charge of the initial form, of the first idea that evolves and yet remains… that tasty and singular intimacy that only drawing can consummate with subjectivities.
Each line drawn is the culmination of a path that began in the artist’s conscience. Inner orbs materialized in the simple complicity of the maker with his instrument, without any other dressing or sieve. Only the twisted musings of the creative psyche manage to lead us along winding paths until we reach the understanding –or leave us stranded by one of them-. The virtuous hand thus traces the testimony and the witness participates in history, or what he assumes of it.
In this way, we often enter scenarios as alien to our experiences as those that arise in the mind of Jorge Luis Pulido (JPULISHK), who transcribes them in ink on cardboard to make us accomplices of his strange entelechies. Here, professor Chistyakov’s words would allude to the unusual spheres that the Camagüey native, with all his smoothness, throws at us directly from his cosmos. These disturbing episodes, where nature seems to unbalance itself and create alternate worlds that manage to mock what we understand as “real” or “normal”.
A female figure dressed in the European style, perhaps from the end of the 19th century, interpellates us from the work El milagro no.4 (Miracle no.4), with the terrifying naturalness of carrying a rose as her head. She remains imperturbable, as if she were part of the dense forest that surrounds her. As if that place that guards it kept the secrets of its history and of other hallucinating creatures that perhaps roam the untamed thicket. A halo of the Ryhope forest envelops the atmosphere. That arcane expanse described by the book Mitago Wood –a well-known literary influence on the artist- so full of mysteries and suffocating spiritual activity. The woman-pink seems to delimit the space and as a spawn of the wild grove, she warns of what dwells beyond.
Thus, in Pulido’s works, the primitive of the line interweaves with the original impulse of nature. The gestures become at times impetuous, at times delicate, in a pressing attempt to exalt the monumentality of creation and re-assume it as his habitat –as it was for man from the beginning-. Thus, in his series In the habitat of my art, nature rises gloriously over human vestiges that, nevertheless, are perceived as organic with the environment. Fragments perhaps of the artist’s memory, of his experiences, of his longings, burst into the leafy view loaded with jungle and tropics. His intention is none other than to return to the former, to return to that forgotten, sullied nature. As if in an act of belated repentance, the man wanted to make amends for his damage and to take his own chance, possibly already unanswered. Desperate impulses to recover a harmony already genetically lost, lead one of JPULISHK’s characters to enter the dead trunk of a tree or the artist himself to continue populating his paintings with those hybrid human-vegetable beings, who carry the weight of creative anxiety and the uneasiness of remaining halfway between two kingdoms. And in that ambiguity rests the work of Jorge Pulido, in that habitat of silent confrontations that seem to shout out the artist’s concerns. “A world of earth and mind, a realm outside the spatio-temporal laws of reality”, which undermines the interiorities of “this side” and stirs deep questions.
Are we aware that every act carries a consequence? Can man bear the one that befalls him? What would happen if nature were to start raiding our territory and making colossal lilies on our temples? Should we not lord it over her with wisdom? How do we recover this link without creating violent impacts?
JPULISHK decides to show these zones of clashes, through anachronistic landscapes that try to revive, necessarily, that lost link. And to the surrealist vis of his scenes, he incorporates the knowledge of the man related to literature. The drawings El milagro no.7 (Basilisa la Hermosa) [Miracle no.7 (Basilisa the Beautiful)] and La zorra y las uvas (The Fox and the Grapes), decontextualize stories that at some point accompanied our childhood readings. Their stories are now rewritten as part of new narratives, becoming more like dream sequences.
Pulido’s small macro-universes –sometimes up to 20 x 20 cm- that amalgamate an accumulation of knowledge, feelings, searches unintelligible to our eyes. The enigma shapes all the images and the careful drawing is tinged by mysterious brushstrokes that unsettle the gaze. Encrypted territories of inanity, intellect and art where, invariably, one can always hear the throbbing of a forest.