BRUMAS: A THEOLOGY OF BLINDNESS
By Cuban-American artist Abisay Puentes
From the conceptual universe of La Parábola
There is a stage in the universe of La Parábola where the soul no longer knows if it is awake or asleep. It is not the moment of impact, nor the dramatic instant of the fall, and not yet the definitive awakening. It is something quieter, more dangerous, and far more subtle: the habit of living inside a fog.
That stage is Brumas.
When I paint this series, I am not thinking of fog as a meteorological phenomenon. I think of it as a spiritual state. A condition of the heart and mind where reality is still there, but arrives distorted, fragmented, twisted. It is not that there is no light; it is that light is no longer understood. And theologically speaking, this is one of the deepest symptoms of spiritual blindness.
1. Fog as a condition of the soul: depravity, not mere distraction
For years, I have carried this image inside me: a man walking in a fog so thick he eventually confuses the path with the destination. To me, that is the human soul without the truth of God—moving, deciding, dreaming, loving, suffering, making plans… but doing it all inside a permanent distortion.
Within Reformed theology, the spiritual tradition that shaped me, this condition is called total depravity. It doesn’t mean the human being is as evil as he could possibly become. It means something more subtle and much more tragic:
there is no part of the human person that remains untouched by this fog.
Not reason.
Not emotion.
Not the will.
Not the moral compass.
Everything is clouded.
When I began to work on Brumas, I realized I wasn’t representing an emotion or a psychological moment. I was painting a state of being.
The man in La Parábola has already passed through seduction and sedation; now he lives in the consequence of that process: a fog around him and within him.
At this point, the problem is not ignorance.
The problem is confidence—the certainty that one “sees” accurately while living in distortion. And when the soul becomes accustomed to its own fog, it starts calling that fog “normal.”
Brumas is the image of that sick normality.
2. Painting the fog: when form collapses and contour surrenders
Visually, Brumas required something from me that changed me as an artist:
abandoning the comfort of defined form.
Figures cannot assert themselves with clarity in this series.
Contours dissolve.
Limits fade.
Shapes hesitate.
I grew up loving drawing, needing the line, relying on the certainty of the edge. But in Brumas, the edge had to die. Fog does not erase things violently; it dissolves them slowly. It makes everything doubtful.
That is why this series is built with:
- translucent layers that never fully reveal,
- surfaces that bury and resurrect shapes,
- gestures that attempt to define but never arrive,
- light that strains to appear but cannot break through.
Whenever I added a layer of paint, I faced a quiet question:
“Is this too much?”
But the painting always answered:
“Not yet.”
Because spiritual fog is not light or poetic; it is heavy.
It clings to the soul like old humidity on a wall.
It corrupts the air, the movement, the sense of direction.
I wanted the viewer to feel a subtle discomfort—
that sensation of almost seeing, yet never fully.
Because the soul in fog lives exactly like that:
always halfway, always half-understanding, always half-awake.
3. The theology of blindness: suppressing truth instead of seeking it
There is a fundamental idea here that connects theology with this series:
spiritual blindness is not only inability. It is resistance.
It is not simply that man cannot see.
It is also that man does not want to see.
Light exposes.
Light confronts.
Light dismantles illusions.
Light demands transformation.
While painting Brumas, I was forced to face my own complicity with the fog. There have been times when I preferred confusion over clarity because clarity hurts. Clarity demands repentance. Fog is comfortable.
Theologically, this is expressed in one of the hardest truths of Scripture:
“Man suppresses the truth.”
Fog is that suppression turned into atmosphere.
This appears in the series through:
compositions that evade stability,
paths that lead nowhere,
glimpses of forms that never become shapes,
visual trails that disappear in silence.
The viewer keeps searching, expecting a revelation.
But revelation refuses to appear.
Not because the painting is mocking the viewer—
but because Brumas is meant to be a mirror:
a place where the soul feels its own disorientation.
4. The machine, the fog, and the man who stops fighting
Within La Parábola, Brumas is not isolated.
It stands within a greater architecture:
- Rito Gular (the offering to the machine)
- Desvanecimiento (the beginning of numbness)
- Mecanikalgia (the full connection to the mechanism)
- Paradox (the fragmentation of reason)
- Vértigo (the awakening)
In Brumas, the man stops resisting.
He stops questioning.
He stops struggling.
He accepts the fog as “normal.”
And spiritually, no darkness is more dangerous than comfortable darkness.
The lie that is recognized as lie can be resisted.
The lie that feels like “normal life” becomes nearly impossible to break.
My brush in this series is not heroic.
It is tired.
Insistent.
Almost obsessive.
I paint, cover, confuse, repeat—
because the soul in fog does that:
it buries clarity under layer after layer of distortion.
5. The narcotic peace of the fog: comfort without truth
One of the elements that most unsettles me about Brumas is the illusion of peace.
These paintings are quiet.
Soft.
Subdued.
Almost restful.
But it is not true rest.
It is anesthesia.
The soul in fog stops questioning,
stops yearning,
stops seeking.
It is indifferent.
And spiritual indifference is more devastating than spiritual rebellion.
Fog gives the appearance of calm,
but beneath that calm lies a profound danger:
the loss of urgency.
That is why Brumas is both beautiful and disturbing.
It is the calm of someone who has surrendered.
6. Glimmers in the fog: the soul’s nostalgia for a forgotten light
Even in the densest fog, I always left tiny openings—
small gestures of light, barely perceptible.
They are not triumphant rays or divine epiphanies.
They are whispers.
Theologically, these glimmers represent something I deeply believe:
the human soul, even in its blindness, was created for light.
- These moments appear through:
- subtle contrasts,
- a faint suggestion of shape,
- a direction of movement that breaks the chaos,
- a nearly invisible brightness.
These are signs of the coming awakening in Vértigo.
Signs that the soul, even lost, carries a faint memory of truth.
Fog is the place where the soul realizes it is lost,
but not yet how to be found.
7. The music of the fog: when sound becomes clouded
Brumas also has a sonic dimension.
Every time I work on these paintings, I hear textures—
low frequencies, slow vibrations, distant echoes.
When I compose music for this series, I choose:
- suspended harmonies,
- unresolved chords,
- sounds processed through layers of distortion,
- breaths and drones,
- echoes that never fully return.
The sound becomes fog.
It becomes atmosphere.
It becomes spiritual condition.
Fog is not silence;
it is blurred sound.
8. The viewer inside the fog: when the painting becomes a mirror
Something beautiful happens when people stand before these paintings.
Their reactions are slow, quiet, unsure.
They often say things like:
- “I feel something is missing.”
- “I want to see more, but I can’t.”
- “It calms me and unsettles me at the same time.”
- “I don’t know what I’m looking at, but it feels like me.”
That last one is the most important.
Fog is the perfect mirror.
Because fog, spiritually, is the human condition without revelation.
Brumas invites the viewer into that space—
not to punish them,
but to awaken them.
Before the awakening of Vértigo,
there must be the confession:
“I am not seeing clearly.”
Fog forces that honesty.
9. Brumas in our generation: sophisticated fog
Brumas is not a relic of some old mystical era.
If anything, our generation is drowning in fog:
Information without truth,
voices without wisdom,
images without meaning,
connection without direction.
The fog of our time is digital, ideological, emotional, cultural.
The modern human being is “connected” but profoundly disoriented.
Fog has never been more sophisticated.
Brumas is my way of telling my generation:
“We are calling this fog progress,
but we still don’t know who we are,
where we come from,
or where we are going.”
10. Why I keep painting the fog: Brumas as the threshold of awakening
After finishing this series, I understood something essential:
Brumas is a threshold.
It is not the fall
and not yet the awakening.
It is the painful middle ground where the soul realizes it is blind
but cannot yet see.
The fog is the confession.
The awakening is the answer.
That is why I continue painting this series—
not to glorify the darkness,
but to reveal it.
Grace only becomes precious
when blindness is acknowledged.
Brumas is the pictorial confession:
“I am in fog.”
Only then can the soul be prepared for the revelation to come.
Conclusion: Brumas as a spiritual confession in paint
If I had to summarize Brumas in one phrase, I would say this:
“It is the visual confession of the human soul
before the light breaks through.”
It is not decoration.
Not ambiance.
Not conceptual abstraction for its own sake.
It is a spiritual diagnosis made visible.
The human being walks inside a fog he does not recognize,
and only the revelation of God can dissolve it.
Until that moment arrives,
Brumas remains necessary—
the chapter where blindness ceases to be an idea
and becomes atmosphere.
And my task, as a painter,
is to register that atmosphere
with absolute honesty.
