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| Carmelo, a genius and a figure |
| From his youth, Carmelo created a very personal and rich repertoire of symbols. Although he didn’t resort to simplistic schemes and clichés, he was neither a creator of airtight pedantries. All of his art is motivating, blunt. However, his large, multiple and complex work demands sharp eyesight and nose.
Carmelo González Iglesias belongs to the generation that burst in Cuba around the forties. By that time, a group of youngsters, all from humble origin and with a calling for the visual arts, prowled or studied at the San Alejandro Academy, by then the old and only professional institution for artistic education supported by the State. Some graduated; some did not, for several reasons. Among those youngsters (Diago, Mijares, Antigua, Luis Alonso, Díaz Peláez, Estopiñán, Escobedo) Carmelo stood out because of his diligence and exceptional talent, as well as for his tánganas (fights). He took his first steps in the so called Free Studio for painters and sculptors created by Abela in 1938 and lasted barely a year, for the State help was scarce and questionable. In San Alejandro he was among the first to support the creation of an art students federation, inspired by the fights of the most radical sectors of the Havana University. At times, the revolutionary students within the Academy were bound to fast in order to ―with the little money available―, buy paintbrushes, oil tubes, canvas or clay for modeling. In this environment of youthful revelry, studies and material shortages, one of the generations was brewing and maturing, probably the last one in the neo-colonial Republic that brought several outstanding and talented figures in the visual arts field, after the first explosion leaded by the generation of the ‘20s against the academic canons. When his studying cycle ended (1938-1945), a meager “traveling bag” they used to give to the students of San Alejandro graduated with best records allowed Carmelo to make his first trip abroad. He went to the United States. In Europe, fascism had been recently defeated and the years of the reconstruction had begun. He joined the Art Students’ League. During his long visits to the Metropolitan Museum and other galleries of modern art, the young Cuban consolidated his admiration for Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, whose well digested influences were becoming clear in the generation of the ‘40s and the ‘50s in Cuba. Until one day ―and here is the influence that marked him for life―, he set the eye upon a painting by Vittore Carpaccio, a Venetian painter of the 15th century. We remember this “collision” with Carpaccio not because of mere show of biographic preciosity, but because in fact ―like Carmelo himself usually admitted―, turned out to be the fire that allowed him to flavor deeply and definitely his style as a painter. With this striking closeness, Carmelo conceived and made his first two transcendental paintings: “Las tentaciones de San Antonio” and “María orando”, characterized by a highly formal and textual concern that, from that moment on, you can see in all of his later works. In Carpaccio is, therefore, the key to understand Carmelo’s work, well in tune with the running times. Back to Cuba, he worked as a professor at the school of visual arts Leopoldo Romañach, in the former province of Las Villas. This was one of the first schools established in an attempt to extend and decentralize the artistic education in the Island. Afterwards, in memorable competitive examinations, Carmelo filled the professorship of Engraving in San Alejandro, due to the demise of its former holder, the painter of Spanish origin Mariano Miguel. Carmelo, who founded early in the fifties the Cuban Engraving Association, renewed the teaching of this artistic practice in the old Academy. In the years after the triumph of the Revolution, he was part of the first group of professors that attended the National Art School (ENA), created to receive art students from every corner of the country. Over these years, Carmelo conceived an enormous mural engraving, formed by the union of several sheets of wood (or plugs) of considerable size, that he entitled “Pseudo-república y Revolución”. In this mural engraving appear the traditional negative elements during the republic (politicking, bullies, unruly soldiers, foreign monopolies, etc), defeated by the new values that came from the popular victory. A copy of this work was given to the Pushkin Museum, in Moscow. In his work as an engraver, there is another fundamental piece entitled “La muerte de Grimau”, made in 1965 as a tribute to the communist leader that was shot in Spain in the years of Franco’s regime. The work upset the Spanish diplomatic representative by then, and in an exhibition he asked to the painter, “Did you do this?” Imitating Picasso in his answer to the fascists in Paris when he was asked the same thing about his oil on the crime in Guernica, Carmelo said, “No, this was made by you”. He had the chance to travel to the former socialists countries of the Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Carmelo died in Havana in 1990, when he was 70 years old, when in his merits in painting and engraving arts could be expected splendid new achievements. But he left a varied work, unavoidable due to its conceptual richness. He was a committed creator, at full speed and taste, which meant to him to seek away from the shouts and the fist. He painted the world of the Revolution with poetic intensity, in which a personal magic realism blows, apparently disturbing the reality and logic structures, but those “leaking” skies, the craters, the wooden and earthen roughness, the metallic coldness of nails, those subdued matches that represent conflict; in short, all of his enormous fantastic repertoire was intended to defend beauty and justice among men. I don’t believe there was a steadier, militant spirit among the contemporary painters and engravers than Carmelo’s. Juan Sánchez, journalist, critic and engraver. Havana, 1993 He works with the everyday simplicity of the potter that mixes the clay, or the constructor that builds minute after minute the new face of towns, or the virtuoso that doesn’t relay the brilliance of his work to a sudden moment of so-called inspiration, but to the consistent and continuous work. So it makes sense to point out that Carmelo is an art worker. His work reflects our time. Although his subjects belong to the past, the painter gives them a contemporary flavor. Carmelo paints the specific problems of his people, but he also paints with the same passion problems related to other peoples. Juan Sánchez, Bohemia magazine, 1976. As a painter, Carmelo stands out because of his personal style. It is difficult not to identify him immediately. He is a painter who is vitally clear; that goes from white to black. That means he starts with the light tones and ends placing the darker. He works in ranges and uses the color with transparencies. His graphics are descriptive, clear nearby as well as from afar, in the same way of the Flemish and German school. His technique is simple, because is surmounted to the primitive one. His themes are symbolic. He makes use of eternal objects like the egg and the pyramid; and some other of personal nature, like the extinct match (extinguished passions) and the umbrella (protection). He has been influenced by Carpaccio and Bosco. Before his paintings, we are compelled to admit that they are solidly made, with the strength of the old days’ masters: because Carmelo is a painter, a master in that trade so weakened in our times. The rest is not to be argued. It is a matter of personal appreciation; the appreciation of the mind of the person watching and savoring (this happens to every painter before the public) what he sees, for the human mind isn’t just a little mirror empty from any contents that passively reflects the outer reality, but one that hides a scoundrel goblin who likes to cheat us. Oscar Hurtado, La Gaceta de Cuba, 1962, first two weeks in June, pages 8 and 9. |
| CUBARTE 2006 |