Juan Enrique Guerrero — Early Critical Writings on Abisay Puentes
Juan Enrique Guerrero was a historian, poet, and formative mentor to Abisay Puentes. Written during the artist’s early development in Cuba, these texts document Guerrero’s evolving response to Puentes’s work—from the apocalyptic imagery of the late 1990s to later investigations of captivity, spiritual conflict, allegory, and the relationship between artistic form and belief.
The writings are presented here as historical documents. Their language and interpretations belong to Guerrero and to the specific period in which they were written; they should not be read as a present-day artist statement.
These writings were originally written in Spanish. Read the original Spanish writings →
Contents
- Psychology of the Apocalyptic Face in the Art of Abisay Puentes — Psicología del rostro Apocalíptico en la plástica de Abisay Puentes — 1999
- Beautiful — Good — True — Bella — Buena — Verdadera
- The Becoming of Faces and Visages — El devenir de las caras y rostros — 2001
- The Painting of Abisay Puentes — La pintura de Abisay Puentes
- Theology and the Painting of Abisay Puentes — La teología y la pintura de Abisay Puentes
Psychology of the Apocalyptic Face in the Art of Abisay Puentes
Psicología del rostro Apocalíptico en la plástica de Abisay Puentes
1999
Dr. Juan Enrique Guerrero Álvarez
For Abisay Puentes (1974), the face is an imprint, and that imprint is the trace that time and space leave upon the soul of man. By its essence, the face reveals two modes of being—hence the masks of Greek portraiture (tragedy and comedy)—but here the painter, moved by his biblical vocation, unveils for us the Apocalyptic mystery concealed by the face of historical man. Revelation and consolation, hope and anguish. The history of the soul reflected in the face.
In Greek statuary, heads had no pupils; the globe of the eye was like a small, round, blind world, without a sense of time. In Abisay, the eyes are like tunnels devouring the hours, concealing messages and warnings from another space. Faces lengthen or become round according to the desolation or hope inhabiting their inner times. The cavernous grimace, the silent guffaw, psychic elements of existential unrest, bowed heads, supplicant heads livid and perplexed by the final revolution.
The tension produced by a life of sin and the serene joy of one who possesses temperance and love. The painter’s work moves between two tensions. Desolation pulls at faces that tend to disappear like an enchanted shagreen skin. Hope restores their weightless roundness. The passion of fear, the passion of waiting. All his drawings are inhabited by the furnishings of the Book, the Apocalypse of Saint John.
Through the tension he places in the expressions, the warning of conversion begins; through the astonishment of the countenances, the warning ends in an ultimatum. This psychology in religious art is neither pessimistic nor optimistic; it is one of profound Christian realism, a sign of eschatological hope. The painter assumes the Apocalyptic climate to illustrate what is said in Revelation 7:9: “After this I looked and saw a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes and holding palms in their hands.”
We stand before a new way of allegorizing visions, if we take into account Albrecht Dürer’s engravings (1471–1528) on the same subject. Puentes’s art is unsettling not to let beauty rest, because what his ingenuity demands of form does not satisfy him.
In his lines, unexpected expressions stand out, the rigid transformation of the final destiny of man and the world. In Greek art, proportion condenses; eurythmy wisely limits. Puente Abisay abounds in proportions amid the strangeness of being before the prophecies.
Greek forms are empty of time and astonishment. Abisay gathers space and introduces it into eschatological temporality with the amazement of a prophet. He separates visages from faces, unfolding the traces of time in the soul of heads. Biblical time circulates through the intricacies of his pen strokes, and his brush adapts to it like mesh to the body. “Figures in continuous curling, as on the surfaces in Velázquez” (according to Camón Aznar), brushed by the passage of shadows seeking light as in Rembrandt’s canvases.
His norm is not a landscape or a portrait, but the cosmos and the nature of the penultimate hour and the ultimate life. His young and developing perfection resides in his allegorical possibilities, enriched by the transcendence these subjects hold for souls seeking the meaning and purpose of existence, sounding out the way, the life, and the truth that are Christ and his word.
“And the kings of the earth, and the great men, the rich men, the captains, the mighty men, and every servant and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and among the rocks of the mountains; and said to the mountains and rocks: Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of his wrath has come; and who shall be able to stand?”
(Revelation 6:15–17)
Beautiful — Good — True
Bella — Buena — Verdadera
Dr. Juan Enrique Guerrero Álvarez
One paints from an emotional need for self-affirmation and for the psychological transfer of states of soul and spirit that lead the conscious or subconscious mind to objectify personality, temperament, and character in a particular form and material. One paints, writes poetry, and makes music in order to transfer, displace, and condense the moral and emotional states of the personality; in the case before us—that of these painters—into a visual, plastic form upon the material of canvas and color, transmuting the intimate world of temperament and character into allegorical subjects with meanings and styles that are more or less definable.
There are many ways (styles) of doing this, and modes (aesthetics) of feeling them. The guiding faculty is intuition joined to ingenuity, because ingenuity and talent will reveal themselves later. Every young painter is a “germinating mustard seed,” a possibility; hence the measure of “anonymous fame” they already possess, and, because their already familiar trajectory is impossible to predict, the phrase “Impossible Painters.”
On the other hand, one does not enjoy what one does not understand; one does not understand what one does not feel; and what one does not feel can be neither enjoyed nor understood. To feel a work of visual art is not to discourse upon it, to pin a label to it as one pins a butterfly in a museum case. To feel an oil painting or a drawing is to intuit imaginatively the extent to which it fulfills this: Good, Beautiful, and True.
The painter’s eye is like a magnet that attracts fragments of other realities and models in order to magnetize his own work and give it apparent or real unity. Among the youngest, among those beginning, it is a search and renewed search through periods and archetypes, so criticism in that respect is useless; style and the impossibility of predicting it legitimize the measure of truth, goodness, and beauty that the painter has thus far managed to make poetic.
Hasty criticism deforms the truth of the painting; harshness of opinion deforms its nascent beauty; rejection paralyzes goodness, the initial innocence of vocation. The incomprehension of “learned ignorance” and the insensitivity of mercantile blindness compensate themselves by labeling and placing a price.
One can reach the truth of painting only by immersing oneself in the life of form; in this way the painter will make it beautiful and good, and all this will be possessed by whoever touches his own “substantial being”—not through a merely reproductive mental effort based on models, but through a very personal, subtle, and indefinable gift: that virtue which grants the power and capacity to symbolize by transfiguring the model or prototypes with which every painter, poet, or musician begins to practice and become motivated.
He will then be able to plunge into the life of form and attain that truth, goodness, and beauty of the work; and for this, paradoxically, one must discover “form” in the life of one’s own vocation. Then it will be the artist who dictates his great definition to the critic and the immeasurable price of his work to the merchant.
The Becoming of Faces and Visages
El devenir de las caras y rostros
2001
Dr. Juan Enrique Guerrero Álvarez
The series that “Professionalized” this young painter was his exhibition “The Apocalypse of Abisay,” which had successive stagings, all met with a sensitive “spiritual and material” reception. Now we face another presence, that of “Faces in Captivity.” It began with the leitmotif of apocalyptic faces, of visages laid bare under judgment; now it evolves toward meditative faces and torsos with pensive hands.
A Gothic framing of the apocalyptic gesture? To speak of this painter, a poem would be better. As I have said, art that is good, beautiful, and true rejects labels; by itself it casts off the seal of fame’s “book of hours.” Among the “impossible painters,” he has been the most considerable; from his apocalyptic beginnings he has maintained a precise route of expression that is easily demonstrable.
In this exhibition there are no longer “bodies swirling, faces dislocated,” as we expressed it on that occasion. Now the faces relax, lengthen, and tame their expressions while seeking repose in a curious muteness, where hands seem like paralyzed wings in a meditative search for dark dovecotes.
The figures, set as though in a niche, peer out wrapped—Gothically? The hands assume a frozen gesture, and the fingers resemble those undulating algae submerged in the sea. He defines them as “souls in captivity.” Could they be those souls from his initial “Apocalypse” that have returned “to the life that saves”? The repose of these faces lends itself to controversy. Sadness, bitterness, weariness, monastic torpor? A filigreed halo surrounds each countenance—captivity from another life?
In visual art, “reincarnation” is possible. And this series is an example of it. Abisay has made those faces and bodily masses “reincarnate” in an intermediate state between anguish and repose. A return to life in the niches of this earth? Each painting in this series is like a sleepy cocoon into which the old faces “of the Apocalypse of Abisay” have again submerged. What does each cocoon contain?
Each of these oils is like a chrysalis which, between caterpillar and butterfly, makes one feel “the nymph,” beautiful, good, and true, of his youthful art. This new series is like that “nymph,” a promising “intermediate state” between the first exhibition that Professionalized him and the immeasurable future of his fame among painters impossible to foresee.
The Painting of Abisay Puentes
La pintura de Abisay Puentes
Dr. Juan Enrique Guerrero Álvarez
Art has served as an intellectual and spiritual confession for so many painters in the History of art that books would not suffice to gather the thought, psychology, and personality of every work and every author.
So it is with this painter, Abisay Puentes, who shows us a vision of his mental and spiritual struggles and conflicts, making us participants in an entire Universe, rich in textures and colors, profound and encoded. At first glance it might seem like still waters, but when we enter them we gain the sense that he is compressing an immense ocean around us.
His images are always speaking to us, communicating with “an insensitive and deaf world...” as he puts it. He also tells us, “I do not consider myself misunderstood; simply, my subject is not digestible by the common mentality...” All this leads us to weigh him in the balance, to see whether he measures up to a man of extraordinary sensitivity, and to test the truth of his words. Thus he continues: “I still have much to learn in this life, if God allows it; always to search in books, in my faith. That is where I find repose; it is like finding water in a desert, and it is my refuge, because I find answers. I find nothing else attractive, only my place, where I meet God. Outside of that, my family...”
And is it possible that, in such an agitated world, this artist finds peace? Apparently so, for his paintings transmit to us that exercise of meditation, of being alone, removed from earthly clamor. He wastes no time on excess words, nor does his eloquence depend on a multitude of words; rather, he concentrates on his subject and speaks by placing his finger upon the wound.
Subjects such as “The Destiny of Man,” “Dissociated States of Mind,” and “Impenitent Liturgies” are revealed to us through the brushes of this painter, who apparently has much to say and little time. We trust that he will have enough life to tell us more; all that remains is to wait through the endless hours of solitude and searching that his way of living holds for him. His work tells us that it possesses spirituality; the rest is left to time.
Theology and the Painting of Abisay Puentes
La teología y la pintura de Abisay Puentes
Dr. Juan Enrique Guerrero Álvarez
What theological function can visual art have? Can visual art be the handmaid, the servant of theology, as reason is according to Saint Thomas Aquinas? The painter’s plan is to establish, through his work, premises by which visual art might become an instrument of theological teaching and, in turn, the servant of a project for a “School of Reformed Religious Painters.” This exhibition is the prologue to that project.
The layperson, the uninformed, the nonbeliever will ask many questions about it; perhaps he will become curious and want to learn. Otherwise, he will be captivated by these conceptual mysteries of high poetic and pictorial value. The believer, the knowledgeable observer, will immediately intuit the secrets and purposes of this young artist.
Since his most significant exhibition, where we said he became “professionalized,” Abisay has shown us his personal seal. That subject matter is now consummated in this exhibition; the faces ceased to be those symbolic masks of the Apocalypse of the times and return their visages to us with the life they once possessed, each with the passion that afflicted it. If the gesture of that earlier exhibition was apocalyptic and pained, these allow the eschatological image that preceded them to be felt.
As I said in the prologue that, on the occasion of that exhibition, gave rise to a book: “His allegories condense a style of the soul; he does not draw the sinful, reprehensible act, but penetrates the essence of its consequences and makes them felt by the eyes”... Metaphysical art? Perhaps, but not incomprehensible at first sight.
If we consider the abstract and capricious subject matter of other painters, Abisay’s work concretizes rather than dissolves a testimony of his own worldview of the universe, faithful to the faith of his ancestors and to the eternal paradigm that a work, in order to aspire to perfection, must be “Good, beautiful, and true.”
This exhibition is the culmination of that other one held at “La Madriguera” (gallery of the Asociación Hermanos Saíz), called “The Becoming of Faces and Visages.” We are witnessing the consummation of that exhibition, and, as we also wrote on that occasion: “Among ‘the impossible painters,’ he has been the most considerable; from his apocalyptic beginnings he has maintained a precise route of expression that is easily demonstrable”...
This time the faces are not those of the resurrected, but of souls whose bodies have not yet died—or rather, those same souls returned, through a leap in time, to the existence that lost them, embedded in a limiting condition of life that loses: sin; certain sins evoked here, grafted into a context of biblical revelations capable of being allegorized in visual images as testimony and, if one wishes, with an evangelizing intention.
In a compressed synthesis, we set out the meaning of this exhibition and, in turn, the artist’s intentions to establish through this exhibition and the previous one a “school of reformed religious painters,” and of painters with a vocation for it.
Foundations for a “School” of Reformed Religious Painters
Fundamentos para una “escuela” de pintores religiosos reformados
The title may awaken controversies or passing paradoxes, but there is nothing new in speaking of the aesthetics of the art of the Protestant Reformation or the Catholic Counter-Reformation. What concerns us here is our environment, identity, and idiosyncrasy, and the artist who has laid the cornerstone for this school. Thus we shall state succinctly the stylistic principles that constitute it and its plan of objectifications, as well as its aesthetic meaning, beginning from the philosophy of the painter Abisay Puentes.
- The Gothic. It is what defines a distinctly religious visual art, and what he proposes is framed within this style through the ascetic character of its subjects; the kinds of allegories; and the apocalyptic and eschatological climate as the setting or treatment of oil, acrylic, mixed media, or pen and ink.
- Asceticism in visual art. By asceticism in visual art, we understand the sobriety or rigidity of the subject objectified in images that breathe rigor in gesture, meditation, the introverted imprint of a life turned inward.
- The allegorical types. The concept of “allegory” is well known. According to the painter who concerns us, allegory—when it deals with matters touching on “eschatology” (the end of time) or the “Apocalypse” (the Last Judgment)—must be the reflection of the inner state of souls, a phenomenon that must be “refracted” through the mirror of oil or another technique. This aesthetic work must be approached with a disciplined fantasy knowledgeable about its subject, and with rigorous imagination capable of objectifying sensibly, before the eyes, ideas that go beyond familiar realism and surrealism, while avoiding the stereotype of the traditionally historical allegories consecrated by Dürer and others, as well as by the greatest illustrators of these subjects, such as Gustave Doré. Their works, however, may serve as a basis for the imagination to enrich fantasy, which combines what is imagined from a prototypical model.
- The apocalyptic and eschatological climate. Creating an atmosphere in this sense has its technique (style), but what is the product of ingenuity or talent is the appropriate aesthetics—the way the implicit message in the pure impression of the pictorial image is made felt through style. Hence color arising from drawing, glazes for that atmosphere, the use of processed industrial black, layers of flat color, light gathered from rubbing, and chiaroscuro that must not be the customary kind in the manner of El Greco or Goya.
Let us remember the foundations of severe Gothic art, which is ideally suited to what this painter proposes, because visual worldviews that proceed from theology emerge from the being of faith, from the biblical word; they are never magnetized by Cubism or Expressionism because they possess the essence of Gothic enchantment. Gothic is not the Middle Ages, whatever may be said; the Gothic is a transcendental. The Gothic does not displace drawing, nor turn colors into watercolor; light and shadow make precise the concrete message of an allegorized, non-mythical creed, without Renaissance anxiety, the classical rumination of pagan bucolicism, or the shortsighted syndromes of Impressionist landscape painting.
The Gothic is the balance point between the tray of the Renaissance and the Baroque pan, and potentially it will always remain so in any period, especially whenever one wishes to conjure a conciliator, a mediator to balance and calm those extreme positions that emerge in the transitory movements of painters searching for themselves, yet with their gaze fixed upon the fingers of artists wielding the fashionable brush and the sensationalist stroke.
I believe we stand before a young Gothic painter—Creole, yes, but faithful to those mysterious visual ancestors of the past that underlie present creative talent through the secret atavisms of the religious ideal, without appropriation or alienation. A Gothic revival at any stage in the history of painting, in any country, saves us from aesthetic chaos, stylistic shortcuts, and the alienating catharsis of visual art as a substitute for a deficient being.
Conclusions
Every synthesis is the fusion of what is substantial in a subject, however long or profound it may be, whose development already belongs to a specialized treatise. Therefore every masterful synthesis must, in brief time and space, make the soul of a work and its purposes felt.
That is what we have tried to do here: to make “information” something more than “informing”—that is, to make felt the reach and depth of what this painter proposes with his “school” and philosophy of religious art. Here the essential parameters of this school have been set out; the rest, submerged like an “iceberg,” will be revealed by the painter in his classes and exhibitions: secrets and mysteries of eschatological talent and apocalyptic feeling.
Dr. Juan Enrique Guerrero Álvarez
Poet and Historian
Centro de Divulgación Cultural de Conferencias
U.N.H.I.C.