Critic Texts
Fragments of the City and other Motifs
ArtNexus No. 50 - Sep 2003
By Jorge de la Fuente
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.
The rethoric of Enigma: An approach to the painting of Gustavo Acosta
By Ricardo Pau-Llosa
Most of Latin America original and enduring artists ground their aesthetic in a sense of theater, a word which in other currents of Western modernism suffered the same scorn as reference. In the pursuit of a pictorial idiom that was as new as the society industrialization was forging, modernists from Cézanne on were driven by an oddly unreflecting distaste for reference and theatricality. The revealing exception to this trend was, of course, Surrealism-more the chance encounter of Psychoanalysis and Classicism on the operating table of the canvas than a Modernist art. The modern work of art, to become a world onto itself, had to owe as little as possible to the visual world we share. Much has been said about the rehabilitation of both these banished terms reference and theater, with the onset of post-modernism, but even this market-driven chanting about personal and social psychosis is, like the instinctively rebellious adolescent, too bound to that which it seeks to break from to be truly a thing (or personality) in itself. Journalism coded for the exclusive savoring of a clique is still journalism, and faux heuristic catharsis is always a bore. Latin American art, distinct from European and North American modernism in large part because it sought to diversify and expand rather than discard the presence of history in its imagery, never stigmatized the theatrical or the referential in painting, and this forms the basis of any serious discussion of any of the region's important artists. Gustavo Acosta is hardly the exception.
Las Armas Secretas de Gustavo Acosta.
Las Armas Secretas de Gustavo Acosta.
By Orlando Hernandez.
( Texto inedito )
Qué lentitud la de Gustavo Acosta para acercarse al hombre, a lo humano. Cuántas metáforas y circunloquios para no mencionar el rostro, el cuerpo, para evitar en su pintura la brusca historia del nosotros, del ustedes, del yo; para no utilizar el dedo índice, la flecha, sino ese gesto vago, casi imperceptible con que mostramos sin señalar, con que decimos es ése, mira ahí. Qué timidez la de Gustavo frente a lo inmediato y directo, qué cautela. Como si la presencia de la figura humana, de sus acciones, de sus accidentes, le amordazara la expresión. Y cuánta habilidad entonces para hacer de las cosas del hombre, de sus ambientes, de sus objetos, de sus herramientas, no sólo sus prolongaciones, sus emblemas, sus símbolos, sino sus dobles, sus espejos.
Ruinas (Invisibles) de Gustavo Acosta.
Ruinas (Invisibles) de Gustavo Acosta.
Exposición Las sugestiones del Limite. Galeria Habana. 1992.
By Orlando Hernandez
"Mehr Licht"
J.W Goethe
Yo recordaba sólo ruinas. Ruinas oscuras, desoladas. Recordaba fragmentos de columnas, escalinatas incompletas, templos destruidos. Y sin embargo, no había ninguna ruina en estos cuadros últimos de Gustavo Acosta. Todo se hallaba intacto. (Oscuro, pero intacto.) Algo --dentro o fuera de mí-- colocaba frente a los ojos de mi memoria aquellas destrucciones. Volvía entonces una y otra vez a mirar las imponentes telas, y al alejarme de ellas volvían las ruinas a instalarse como en una mortificante pesadilla. Lo inexistente ocupaba el lugar de lo visible y comenzaba a destruir a mis espaldas la verdadera imagen. Pieza a pieza los monumentos, los panteones, los arcos eran súbitamente desmontados con precisión diabólica y reducidos a montones de piedras angulosas e inútiles. ¿Debería tomar esta ingrata visión de la pintura de Gustavo Acosta como un aviso, una advertencia, un mal presagio? ¿O simplemente registrarla como casualidad y echar la culpa a mi --esta vez imperdonable-- desatención? "Sólo yo veo ruinas --me decía-- donde debiera ver sólidas construcciones".
Gustavo Acosta and the Anxiety of the Urban
Gustavo Acosta and the Anxiety of the Urban
Edward J. Sullivan
Catalogue text. Elite Fine Art Gallery, January 2001.
From the end of the 1910s through the 1930s the city – with its promise of technological progress and potential of well-being formed the core of a utopian desire that was expressed in the visual images by many of the most significant generation of those artists who attempted to break away from convention and become quintessentially “modern”. From Europeans such as Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay to South Americans like Tarsila de Amaral and Emilio Pettoruti and North Americans such as the Precisionist painters Ralston Crawford, Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, depictions of urban subject matter embodied the optimism (albeit often only tenuous) of the early inter-war period.
La Mirada Desde el Olimpo.
La Mirada Desde el Olimpo.
Amir Valle.
Texto de catálogo, exposición Herir la Memoria.Siguaraya Gallery, Berlin. Septiembre 2009.
Questions to the Mirror
Questions to the Mirror
Carol Damian
Catalogue text. Museum of Contemporary Art. Panama City, Rep. of Panama. June 2009.
In Gustavo Acosta’s finely rendered itinerary of symbolic imagery, the cityscape emerges as the embodiment of many of his concepts and the source of ideas constantly reflected amidst its labyrinthine vistas. When he titles this exhibition “Questions to the Mirror” (“Preguntas al Espejo”), he reinforces the notion that the city, with its surrounding landscape, the essence of urban existence, serves not only as inspiration, but as the path of reflection. Distillations of the city plan, increasingly abstracted over the years, present an intimate code to express memories, nostalgia, and emotions inherent in his art – isolation, yearning, estrangement, fear, hope and fantasy. The spaces he creates are carefully delineated, totally believable, but somehow not quite correct. They are drawn and painted with exactitude so, in an almost voyeuristic way, we are able to see down into the streets and coastlines from above – as if we have the power as viewers to manipulate what is happening. But we see no people. We have no clues. We cannot be sure if it is night or day, or where we are. Are we looking at ourselves, our lives and the story of our existence? Is this the mirror we question with the artist?
Preguntas al Espejo
Preguntas al Espejo
Carol Damian
Texto de catalogo. Museo de Arte Contemporaneo.
Panama. Republica de Panama. Junio 2009
Dentro del itinerario de la imaginería simbólica finamente representada por Gustavo Acosta, el paisaje urbano emerge como la personificación de muchos de los conceptos e ideas que constantemente se ven reflejados en sus laberínticos panoramas. Al titular su exhibición “Preguntas al espejo”, él refuerza la noción de que la ciudad, con su paisaje circundante, la esencia de la existencia urbana, sirve no sólo como inspiración, sino como camino de reflexión. Las destilaciones del plan urbano, cada vez más abstractas al cabo de los años, presentan un código íntimo que sirve para expresar los recuerdos, la nostalgia y las emociones inherentes en su obra: el aislamiento, la añoranza, la enajenación, el miedo, la esperanza y la fantasía. Los espacios por él creados están cuidadosamente delineados, son totalmente creíbles, pero de alguna manera no son del todo correctos. Los dibuja y los pinta con exactitud de modo que, casi de una manera voyerista, podemos observar desde lo alto las calles y los litorales, como si tuviéramos el poder como espectadores de manipular lo que está sucediendo. Pero no vemos gente. No tenemos ninguna pista. No estamos seguros si es de noche o de día, ni dónde estamos. ¿Nos observamos a nosotros mismos, nuestras vidas y la historia de nuestra existencia? ¿Es éste el espejo que cuestionamos junto con el artista?