THE RETHORIC OF ENIGMA: AN APPROACH TO THE PAINTING OF GUSTAVO ACOSTA
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.
When viewers see paintings ruled by sepias, greys and other dark tones, compounded by depictions of empty streets and buildings, or trees haloed by a haunting blimp, they think of mystery. The ebullition and clutter of city life have been stripped to reveal the stage-prop caverns of urbanity like tossed masks or the letters of a forlorn alphabet. A cause, a message lurks hidden among the shrapnel premonitions of ruin. But is mystery truly what Acosta's penetrating images are all about? There is an elucidating distinction between mystery and enigma, and it has to do with reference and theater and the Latin American tradition. A mystery beckons to be solved, and therein dissolved. Mystery is singular in purpose, unequivocal in significance. In contrast, enigma dwells in and spirals out of ambiguity, simultaneous reference, reverberation, and atemporality. Enigma is the genesis of art, inexhaustible yet desirous of being overtaken. Like the horizon, enigma is visible but unreachable. Enigma cannot be bracketed; it is essential to the grasping of a work of art, what makes the grasping itself necessary and possible. Enigma is precisely what the vast majority of post-modernist art is incapable, indeed unwilling, to embrace. Enigma itself is the subject of Acosta's paintings, and what gives them their unique, riveting allure. They are kin to philosophy and poetry and have nothing in common with the vehicles of false newness generated by mere technical wizardry or content surprise and which the art market proffers with dogmatic smugness.
If enigma is the latent heart of art, it manifests itself in a discernible and distinct way in the work of any given artist. Style should be thought of as short-hand for the rhetoric of enigma in individual works or the opus of an artist. As the word rhetoric implies, style is a language and, as such, infinite in expression yet bound by patterns and rules. Rhetoric also suggests thought structured not simply in the communication but in the construction of the idea. It presupposes variance and growth, and not Botero-like repetition. An artist is someone who invents a language we can all understand, often even better than the artist himself. That understanding is certainly not literal nor is it reducible to singular concepts, notions or commands. It's a comprehension that will always be in large measure intuitive, regardless of one's familiarity with the particular artist's work. Yet it has discernible rules. As John Ciardi, the poet, critic and translator of Dante would say, it's not what a poem means but how it means that is important.
What is the general locus of meaning, the overarching theme or tone which Acosta's paintings seek to recreate in the minds of their viewers, and how is this theme or tone recreated? The questions must be answered simultaneously and in terms of each other for the answers to do any justice to the works. What asks for consideration of semantics, and how beckons for observation of syntax and grammar. To begin with, there is a constant and life-giving tension in Acosta's work between surface and space, or between the physical surface of the canvas (which modernists delighted in emphasizing) and non-Euclidean, tridimensional pictorial space (the staple of the visual imagination from the Renaissance to Cubism). At one level, Acosta is intersecting two historically disassociated areas of aesthetic preoccupation, and in doing so he is engaging a path which inspired previous juxtapositions in Cuban art (e.g., Amelia Peláez colonial vitrales and Synthetic Cubism; Wifredo Lam's Oceanian tribal art and Afro-Caribbean animism; Mario Carreño hard-edged Constructivism and mimetic Surrealist rendition). But, of course, Acosta is doing more than discharging the energy of a provocative intersection of concepts. What in a lesser artist might be the visual equivalent of code-switching in language (e.g., Spanglish), in Acosta and his compatriot predecessors has become a way of conjuring forth for inaugural use the enigmas of past imaginative constructs a past only historically, for art is always the present. As we do in language, drafting words and employing rules that are millennial to compose new utterances, so Acosta and other Latin American artists do with art that precedes them historically and coexists in the always-now of the imagination.
Acosta's use of the tension between surface and pictorial space is itself charged with ancillary but impossible to ignore semantic echoes. The palimpsest-like textures he imbues his canvases with are themselves signs of the passing of time. Not only do we associate these creases and layerings with worn papers and walls, Latin American masters Joaquín Torres-García and Rufino Tamayo, to name but two, reinforced this connotation in their works. Conversely, textures of this kind also invite us to dwell on surface, to get close to it. These turbulences ignite the tactile projections of the eye. The texturing, then, engages on its own a paradox that is found throughout Acosta's work, the intersection of the intimate and the impersonal, the moment's lurid peace with history's eternal horizon. In the middle ground of these two poles is consciousness. By defining the extremes, an existential fulcrum is disclosed. It is a binary location of aesthetic viewpoint that plays out in other dimensions of Acosta's visual thinking. We are drawn into a painting that is empty of human presence, hence we are thrown back out of it. We cannot desire to be alone where we seek to find ourselves. A seductive textural curtain also serves to remind us of a lesson learned from Velázquez: we grasp that the scene before us is but a painted image, yet one that makes us reflect on the essentially unattainable nature of shelter in this life of journeying. Texture interacts, dialogues perhaps, directly in Acosta's paintings with light. The dusky earth tones take us to brink of a world where forms are readying their dormant vanishings. Form is sharpened as colors mute their vital creeds. It is by form we know necessity, by color that we savor existence. But texture has claimed the pleasure principle in Acosta's paintings, leaving color and light other poignant tasks. At this point, darkness lights the dim recesses of the mind, exalts the fog forgotten, treasures the genesis of dreamt clarities. We find what we remember having desired, the looming monuments of a lost homeland (Havana's Monument to Martí or the signature Lighthouse of the Morro at the harbor's entrance, for instance) and the avenues where the history of freedom was ordered not to travel under pain of death. This is the proper way for the personal to prepare the profound for others to ponder it. Spare light, at this point, focuses the unbearable link between one man's sense of a lost country and the loss of that country. Because men are not made of stone we cannot linger in a rationed light in the desert cruel order has decreed. But when they muster the heart to see in themselves what they clutched away, like Troy's idols borne Anchises carried in his arms, driven out and prayerful, a certain light takes them there. This is that light. The initial tension between texture and light discloses, in Acosta's work, the semantics of ego-location. At the center of these forces is a felt position of recollection, witnessing, and pondering that yearns for a space, the bread of a physical space, but cannot obtain it. The ego of the exile, and of the exile that rules all thinking and creative beings, is left to haunt the stage history has laid out before him. From this semantics we are led to another, also dialectically conceived. Let us call this new dimension the semantics of intimacy. Darkness evokes here the shield with which each person separates the always personal experiencing of the world from the fact that we coexist with others, equally shielded yet capable of imposing themselves on others. Darkness here heralds freedom from the superego, but it is no mere banner to reckless will and appetite. It opens that secret province of the collective map that belongs to each one alone, the reservoir without which there is no heart. Texture, in this semantic level, evokes the penetrating presence of flesh in the mind. Beyond the tactile dream of the eye is touch itself. The most worldly and world-loving of the senses, it is the one denied to ghosts in our mythologies. The ghost sees, hears, speaks. Bereft of the need to nourish, it may not miss smell and taste. But it knows it is split from time and world because it cannot touch. Acosta makes ghosts of us all, forced to remember touch by what we see: the crumpled silk of world that has lost us. We are now free to inhabit invisibly, but not being able to touch, we are alone with thingness as a resplendent episode of thought without life, which is to say without the passion that time and narrative provide.
The semantics of intimacy, like those of ego-location, are disclosed through a parallel paradox affirmation and denial, intensity of possession joined to the quotidian fury of expulsion. The final dimension of Acosta's play between light and texture is the semantics of remembrance. The previous interactions were centered on the moment of eidetic experience. The semantics of memory focus on felt time, which is to say memory is conceived not simply as recollection but as a far more complex process that partners the creative act. The semantics of remembrance accepts darkness as the indicator of what is lost, either through exile or the dissolutions of time that affect everyone. It is at this point, however, that we appreciate gradations of luminosity. Light is the emblem of evidence, of clear and transmittable witnessing. It designates not only what has endured but what can be understood from the survival of one thing and the disappearance of another. The semantics of remembrance allows the existential to come forward and explain what it has selected and what it has left in the fog forgotten, as if it were a matter of choices made when in reality chaos theory rules in this as in all other matters. It is a process similar to what occurs when we dream. In reality, we recall a dream which may not be at all the dream we had, for in the remembrance and interpretation, even in the privacy of our own minds, the stage, the script, the characters, and the audience have probably been dramatically changed, if not entirely invented in the waking recollection. At this semantic level, Acosta's paintings describe a light which falls as discourse does on the ears of an audience we conjure in ourselves and in others who visit the scene. Texture, within this semantics, expresses this re-experiencing and transformation of what has been recovered from memory. Re-enactment beyond recollection is not re-living but impelling others to live, through images, what is essential to the singular creative mind. Texture and light here serve together to open us to the essential theatricality of Acosta's paintings.
As there are three simultaneously apprehended semantic dimensions in the way Acosta approaches the interaction between pictorial space and painted surface--ego-location, intimacy and remembrance--there are three paradigms of recurring images or symbols: paths, monuments, and evanescent structures. His evocation of cities, plazas, and landscapes (including the sky) fall into these paradigms. These images and archetypes cannot help but come to the artist as well as to the viewer previously charged with denotations and connotations. How they come to mean for us in the specific context of Acosta's work is governed by the semantic dimensions. Certain paradigms will appear to privilege one of these semantic dimensions, but in reality the three are simultaneous and equal. It is this simultaneity which explains the "mystery" of Acosta's paintings and elevates them significantly from what might otherwise be thought of as a kind of film-noir spin on melancholia and nostalgia. Simultaneity is the effect of a theatrically conceived notion of space and time i.e., as reflection and narration at the same time, rather than first as experience, then recollection, then pondering.
To illustrate we need only consider how Acosta uses a generalized shadowing (versus one that obeys the physical laws of shadow projection) to intimate various stages of cognitive action. Even in works where perspective is conceived in classical terms, the imagined ego is placed at various points in the scene. This multiple location achieves two important goals for our sense of ego: it conspires against a linear conception of time and it emphasizes how inextricable are the outward (sensorial) and inward (oneiric) realms of consciousness. Both goals are fundamental to a theatrical, versus a purely sensorial, apprehension of reality. A variously placed existential center, or ego, accepts pleasures, pains, and recollections within a reflective mode which is usually unattainable in the everyday world. Art is always a seduction of oneself that seeks to seduce others. In this sense, then, the simultaneous actions triggered by the play between space and surface in Acosta's paintings opens possibilities of reflection while closing facile emotional responses, such as nostalgia or lyricism. The paradigms themselves usually occur simultaneously in single paintings. A path leads us through trees, above which rises one of Havana's signature patriotic monuments from the fifties. In various paintings, we observe images of Isla de Pinos Presidio Model (model prison), built in the thirties but which would become, in the early years of the communist era, a site of infamous incarceration of political prisoners (newer, bigger, crueler and more hidden prisons would replace this one). The Presidio's buildings were circular around an open atrium, at the center of which was a sentinel tower. Its similarity with Havana's famous Morro Lighthouse is seized by Acosta to elucidate links between defining moments and buildings of Cuban history. The Morro and adjacent Cabaña had also been, since the colonial period, places where persons of conscience were jailed without fair trials and often executed by firing squads against the ancient walls (paredón). Of course, the Morro and Cabaña were designed to guard the entrance to Havana Bay, yet tyrants transformed them into a mannerist emblem of incarceration. A double-mirror repetition of these images reinforces the cyclical tragedy of Cuban political life. The semantic play between space and surface in Acosta's paintings triggers and clarifies the way we experience, feel, and remember this history.
Paths also intersect with the evanescent building, a paradigm that embraces belle epoque-style train stations and roller-coasters. Both these constructions embody the union of journey and architecture; little wonder a painter as aware of exile as Acosta turns to them repeatedly. The iron and glass buildings were also employed to house industries and warehouses. Poignantly, they provide the unique setting where Acosta's fascination with the sky intersects his many domestic interiors whose blank walls and stairs constitute his most abstract, almost constructivist, paintings. The iron and glass structures provide the kind of multiple event Acosta delights in. The viewer ponders a building's structure whose evanescent walls permit a view of the cosmos. A recurring image, the hovering blimp serves as a commentary on the journeying ego-location that figures so prominently in Acosta's paintings. The zeppelin is also a variant of the evanescent building. Take away the skin of the blimp, rest it on the ground, and the constructivist purity of its ironwork is strikingly similar to that of the darkened crystal palaces and roller-coaster. In effect, the evanescent building paradigm is perhaps the most brilliant and economical theatrical setting for the semantic interactions of Acosta's paintings. Here we are within and without, one with the path and not merely a traveler upon it. We are exposed and sheltered. We are caged and guarded. We are inside one of the inaugural tabernacles of industry-driven freedom, yet we are alone with the murky echoes of our unspoken thoughts. Because we are historical beings, we--the viewer and the imagined ego within the scene--provide the closing thoughts on the modern promises this cathedral once held. In the warehouse of silence we stare skyward, but here we are also on the roller-coaster, that Moebius strip of thrill and steel. This could well serve as an emblem in the heraldica of exile.
It is in the evanescent structures where the obstructed path evidenced in other paintings gives way to the conceptual shelter, the building as Bachelardian extension of the body and the mind. The obstacles emerge in conjunction with stairs to augment the vertical power of buildings vis-à-vis the lower point of view of the observer. As spiritual elevation and existential trajectory are denied, shelter assumes a mortuary monumentality. What cannot house, entombs. Thus ego is reminded of its mortality in an architecture that negates intimacy and dwelling. The warehouses also link Acosta's work to art history. Constructivism intersects with the non-Euclidean perspective of the Renaissance: the former rests on the bidimensional grid and the latter spins a fictional space based on the same grid. Here the ego that makes all history co-present and intimate finds its human shield against the sky's unforgiving amnesia. In a consummate paradox reminiscent of Borges' Aleph, the facets of these delicate structures place the ego at the center of a darkened jewel as if this were the imagined, eternal womb in which all viewpoints become one and time has no dominion.
Ricardo Pau-Llosa, 2004.
When viewers see paintings ruled by sepias, greys and other dark tones, compounded by depictions of empty streets and buildings, or trees haloed by a haunting blimp, they think of mystery. The ebullition and clutter of city life have been stripped to reveal the stage-prop caverns of urbanity like tossed masks or the letters of a forlorn alphabet. A cause, a message lurks hidden among the shrapnel premonitions of ruin. But is mystery truly what Acosta's penetrating images are all about? There is an elucidating distinction between mystery and enigma, and it has to do with reference and theater and the Latin American tradition. A mystery beckons to be solved, and therein dissolved. Mystery is singular in purpose, unequivocal in significance. In contrast, enigma dwells in and spirals out of ambiguity, simultaneous reference, reverberation, and atemporality. Enigma is the genesis of art, inexhaustible yet desirous of being overtaken. Like the horizon, enigma is visible but unreachable. Enigma cannot be bracketed; it is essential to the grasping of a work of art, what makes the grasping itself necessary and possible. Enigma is precisely what the vast majority of post-modernist art is incapable, indeed unwilling, to embrace. Enigma itself is the subject of Acosta's paintings, and what gives them their unique, riveting allure. They are kin to philosophy and poetry and have nothing in common with the vehicles of false newness generated by mere technical wizardry or content surprise and which the art market proffers with dogmatic smugness.
If enigma is the latent heart of art, it manifests itself in a discernible and distinct way in the work of any given artist. Style should be thought of as short-hand for the rhetoric of enigma in individual works or the opus of an artist. As the word rhetoric implies, style is a language and, as such, infinite in expression yet bound by patterns and rules. Rhetoric also suggests thought structured not simply in the communication but in the construction of the idea. It presupposes variance and growth, and not Botero-like repetition. An artist is someone who invents a language we can all understand, often even better than the artist himself. That understanding is certainly not literal nor is it reducible to singular concepts, notions or commands. It's a comprehension that will always be in large measure intuitive, regardless of one's familiarity with the particular artist's work. Yet it has discernible rules. As John Ciardi, the poet, critic and translator of Dante would say, it's not what a poem means but how it means that is important.
What is the general locus of meaning, the overarching theme or tone which Acosta's paintings seek to recreate in the minds of their viewers, and how is this theme or tone recreated? The questions must be answered simultaneously and in terms of each other for the answers to do any justice to the works. What asks for consideration of semantics, and how beckons for observation of syntax and grammar. To begin with, there is a constant and life-giving tension in Acosta's work between surface and space, or between the physical surface of the canvas (which modernists delighted in emphasizing) and non-Euclidean, tridimensional pictorial space (the staple of the visual imagination from the Renaissance to Cubism). At one level, Acosta is intersecting two historically disassociated areas of aesthetic preoccupation, and in doing so he is engaging a path which inspired previous juxtapositions in Cuban art (e.g., Amelia Peláez colonial vitrales and Synthetic Cubism; Wifredo Lam's Oceanian tribal art and Afro-Caribbean animism; Mario Carreño hard-edged Constructivism and mimetic Surrealist rendition). But, of course, Acosta is doing more than discharging the energy of a provocative intersection of concepts. What in a lesser artist might be the visual equivalent of code-switching in language (e.g., Spanglish), in Acosta and his compatriot predecessors has become a way of conjuring forth for inaugural use the enigmas of past imaginative constructs a past only historically, for art is always the present. As we do in language, drafting words and employing rules that are millennial to compose new utterances, so Acosta and other Latin American artists do with art that precedes them historically and coexists in the always-now of the imagination.
Acosta's use of the tension between surface and pictorial space is itself charged with ancillary but impossible to ignore semantic echoes. The palimpsest-like textures he imbues his canvases with are themselves signs of the passing of time. Not only do we associate these creases and layerings with worn papers and walls, Latin American masters Joaquín Torres-García and Rufino Tamayo, to name but two, reinforced this connotation in their works. Conversely, textures of this kind also invite us to dwell on surface, to get close to it. These turbulences ignite the tactile projections of the eye. The texturing, then, engages on its own a paradox that is found throughout Acosta's work, the intersection of the intimate and the impersonal, the moment's lurid peace with history's eternal horizon. In the middle ground of these two poles is consciousness. By defining the extremes, an existential fulcrum is disclosed. It is a binary location of aesthetic viewpoint that plays out in other dimensions of Acosta's visual thinking. We are drawn into a painting that is empty of human presence, hence we are thrown back out of it. We cannot desire to be alone where we seek to find ourselves. A seductive textural curtain also serves to remind us of a lesson learned from Velázquez: we grasp that the scene before us is but a painted image, yet one that makes us reflect on the essentially unattainable nature of shelter in this life of journeying. Texture interacts, dialogues perhaps, directly in Acosta's paintings with light. The dusky earth tones take us to brink of a world where forms are readying their dormant vanishings. Form is sharpened as colors mute their vital creeds. It is by form we know necessity, by color that we savor existence. But texture has claimed the pleasure principle in Acosta's paintings, leaving color and light other poignant tasks. At this point, darkness lights the dim recesses of the mind, exalts the fog forgotten, treasures the genesis of dreamt clarities. We find what we remember having desired, the looming monuments of a lost homeland (Havana's Monument to Martí or the signature Lighthouse of the Morro at the harbor's entrance, for instance) and the avenues where the history of freedom was ordered not to travel under pain of death. This is the proper way for the personal to prepare the profound for others to ponder it. Spare light, at this point, focuses the unbearable link between one man's sense of a lost country and the loss of that country. Because men are not made of stone we cannot linger in a rationed light in the desert cruel order has decreed. But when they muster the heart to see in themselves what they clutched away, like Troy's idols borne Anchises carried in his arms, driven out and prayerful, a certain light takes them there. This is that light. The initial tension between texture and light discloses, in Acosta's work, the semantics of ego-location. At the center of these forces is a felt position of recollection, witnessing, and pondering that yearns for a space, the bread of a physical space, but cannot obtain it. The ego of the exile, and of the exile that rules all thinking and creative beings, is left to haunt the stage history has laid out before him. From this semantics we are led to another, also dialectically conceived. Let us call this new dimension the semantics of intimacy. Darkness evokes here the shield with which each person separates the always personal experiencing of the world from the fact that we coexist with others, equally shielded yet capable of imposing themselves on others. Darkness here heralds freedom from the superego, but it is no mere banner to reckless will and appetite. It opens that secret province of the collective map that belongs to each one alone, the reservoir without which there is no heart. Texture, in this semantic level, evokes the penetrating presence of flesh in the mind. Beyond the tactile dream of the eye is touch itself. The most worldly and world-loving of the senses, it is the one denied to ghosts in our mythologies. The ghost sees, hears, speaks. Bereft of the need to nourish, it may not miss smell and taste. But it knows it is split from time and world because it cannot touch. Acosta makes ghosts of us all, forced to remember touch by what we see: the crumpled silk of world that has lost us. We are now free to inhabit invisibly, but not being able to touch, we are alone with thingness as a resplendent episode of thought without life, which is to say without the passion that time and narrative provide.
The semantics of intimacy, like those of ego-location, are disclosed through a parallel paradox affirmation and denial, intensity of possession joined to the quotidian fury of expulsion. The final dimension of Acosta's play between light and texture is the semantics of remembrance. The previous interactions were centered on the moment of eidetic experience. The semantics of memory focus on felt time, which is to say memory is conceived not simply as recollection but as a far more complex process that partners the creative act. The semantics of remembrance accepts darkness as the indicator of what is lost, either through exile or the dissolutions of time that affect everyone. It is at this point, however, that we appreciate gradations of luminosity. Light is the emblem of evidence, of clear and transmittable witnessing. It designates not only what has endured but what can be understood from the survival of one thing and the disappearance of another. The semantics of remembrance allows the existential to come forward and explain what it has selected and what it has left in the fog forgotten, as if it were a matter of choices made when in reality chaos theory rules in this as in all other matters. It is a process similar to what occurs when we dream. In reality, we recall a dream which may not be at all the dream we had, for in the remembrance and interpretation, even in the privacy of our own minds, the stage, the script, the characters, and the audience have probably been dramatically changed, if not entirely invented in the waking recollection. At this semantic level, Acosta's paintings describe a light which falls as discourse does on the ears of an audience we conjure in ourselves and in others who visit the scene. Texture, within this semantics, expresses this re-experiencing and transformation of what has been recovered from memory. Re-enactment beyond recollection is not re-living but impelling others to live, through images, what is essential to the singular creative mind. Texture and light here serve together to open us to the essential theatricality of Acosta's paintings.
As there are three simultaneously apprehended semantic dimensions in the way Acosta approaches the interaction between pictorial space and painted surface--ego-location, intimacy and remembrance--there are three paradigms of recurring images or symbols: paths, monuments, and evanescent structures. His evocation of cities, plazas, and landscapes (including the sky) fall into these paradigms. These images and archetypes cannot help but come to the artist as well as to the viewer previously charged with denotations and connotations. How they come to mean for us in the specific context of Acosta's work is governed by the semantic dimensions. Certain paradigms will appear to privilege one of these semantic dimensions, but in reality the three are simultaneous and equal. It is this simultaneity which explains the "mystery" of Acosta's paintings and elevates them significantly from what might otherwise be thought of as a kind of film-noir spin on melancholia and nostalgia. Simultaneity is the effect of a theatrically conceived notion of space and time i.e., as reflection and narration at the same time, rather than first as experience, then recollection, then pondering.
To illustrate we need only consider how Acosta uses a generalized shadowing (versus one that obeys the physical laws of shadow projection) to intimate various stages of cognitive action. Even in works where perspective is conceived in classical terms, the imagined ego is placed at various points in the scene. This multiple location achieves two important goals for our sense of ego: it conspires against a linear conception of time and it emphasizes how inextricable are the outward (sensorial) and inward (oneiric) realms of consciousness. Both goals are fundamental to a theatrical, versus a purely sensorial, apprehension of reality. A variously placed existential center, or ego, accepts pleasures, pains, and recollections within a reflective mode which is usually unattainable in the everyday world. Art is always a seduction of oneself that seeks to seduce others. In this sense, then, the simultaneous actions triggered by the play between space and surface in Acosta's paintings opens possibilities of reflection while closing facile emotional responses, such as nostalgia or lyricism. The paradigms themselves usually occur simultaneously in single paintings. A path leads us through trees, above which rises one of Havana's signature patriotic monuments from the fifties. In various paintings, we observe images of Isla de Pinos Presidio Model (model prison), built in the thirties but which would become, in the early years of the communist era, a site of infamous incarceration of political prisoners (newer, bigger, crueler and more hidden prisons would replace this one). The Presidio's buildings were circular around an open atrium, at the center of which was a sentinel tower. Its similarity with Havana's famous Morro Lighthouse is seized by Acosta to elucidate links between defining moments and buildings of Cuban history. The Morro and adjacent Cabaña had also been, since the colonial period, places where persons of conscience were jailed without fair trials and often executed by firing squads against the ancient walls (paredón). Of course, the Morro and Cabaña were designed to guard the entrance to Havana Bay, yet tyrants transformed them into a mannerist emblem of incarceration. A double-mirror repetition of these images reinforces the cyclical tragedy of Cuban political life. The semantic play between space and surface in Acosta's paintings triggers and clarifies the way we experience, feel, and remember this history.
Paths also intersect with the evanescent building, a paradigm that embraces belle epoque-style train stations and roller-coasters. Both these constructions embody the union of journey and architecture; little wonder a painter as aware of exile as Acosta turns to them repeatedly. The iron and glass buildings were also employed to house industries and warehouses. Poignantly, they provide the unique setting where Acosta's fascination with the sky intersects his many domestic interiors whose blank walls and stairs constitute his most abstract, almost constructivist, paintings. The iron and glass structures provide the kind of multiple event Acosta delights in. The viewer ponders a building's structure whose evanescent walls permit a view of the cosmos. A recurring image, the hovering blimp serves as a commentary on the journeying ego-location that figures so prominently in Acosta's paintings. The zeppelin is also a variant of the evanescent building. Take away the skin of the blimp, rest it on the ground, and the constructivist purity of its ironwork is strikingly similar to that of the darkened crystal palaces and roller-coaster. In effect, the evanescent building paradigm is perhaps the most brilliant and economical theatrical setting for the semantic interactions of Acosta's paintings. Here we are within and without, one with the path and not merely a traveler upon it. We are exposed and sheltered. We are caged and guarded. We are inside one of the inaugural tabernacles of industry-driven freedom, yet we are alone with the murky echoes of our unspoken thoughts. Because we are historical beings, we--the viewer and the imagined ego within the scene--provide the closing thoughts on the modern promises this cathedral once held. In the warehouse of silence we stare skyward, but here we are also on the roller-coaster, that Moebius strip of thrill and steel. This could well serve as an emblem in the heraldica of exile.
It is in the evanescent structures where the obstructed path evidenced in other paintings gives way to the conceptual shelter, the building as Bachelardian extension of the body and the mind. The obstacles emerge in conjunction with stairs to augment the vertical power of buildings vis-à-vis the lower point of view of the observer. As spiritual elevation and existential trajectory are denied, shelter assumes a mortuary monumentality. What cannot house, entombs. Thus ego is reminded of its mortality in an architecture that negates intimacy and dwelling. The warehouses also link Acosta's work to art history. Constructivism intersects with the non-Euclidean perspective of the Renaissance: the former rests on the bidimensional grid and the latter spins a fictional space based on the same grid. Here the ego that makes all history co-present and intimate finds its human shield against the sky's unforgiving amnesia. In a consummate paradox reminiscent of Borges' Aleph, the facets of these delicate structures place the ego at the center of a darkened jewel as if this were the imagined, eternal womb in which all viewpoints become one and time has no dominion.
Ricardo Pau-Llosa, 2004.
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