One
of the most vigorous features inherent to the Hispanic artists of our century
springs from their reluctance to abandon the wealth of tradition. Hispanic
artists have succeeded in rearticulating a faithful yet transfused vision
through highly personalized forms of imaginative expression. Their paradoxical
challenge is more resilient and less chancy than it appears at first
glance.
We might recall, for example, the inception of Modernist
plastic thought in Spain and its beginnings by the Catalonian Renaixença,
Gaudí's Casa Vicens (1878-80) in Barcelona emerged from roots that
extend deeply into the peninsula Moorish legacy. At the end of modern
era, Picasso undoubtedly epitomized its scientific dash; yet despite
a latent sentimentalizé françhise in his approach, observed
acutely by Gertrude Stein, he could barely restrain a raging españolismo.
In Spanish America too, contrasting cultures clashed over a millennium in our century’s wake. Meaning embodied the works of Tamayo, Matta, Guayasamin, Lam, Kahlo, Botero, Cuevas, for all their newness, adhere to a backbone of tradition. Their canvases, triumphantly diverse from one another in thematic treatment, range, and style, are nevertheless bound by the same radical force unleashed by Spanish American Modernism: the retention of a unifying ideo-aesthetic credo amidst ethnic pluralism, transculturation, and renewal.
Diaspora to as it increasingly flowed across the boundaries of the continental U.S.A. Uncompromising influences from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba are woven into the social-cultural warp of Anglo North America. Only in the last decade, however, have we witnessed the flourishing of a new generation of U.S.-based Latin American artists—committed sons and daughters of the “cosmic race” that Vasconcelos envisaged—who add a flesh, albeit often tragic, dimension and character to the Hispanic aesthetic tradition through their recent work. In Chicago a handful of young plastic artists from Puerto Rico truly represent this late geographical shift, including Oscar Luis Martínez. Born in Ponce, a city on the Southwestern coast of Puerto Rico Oscar Luis Martínez’s later work reveals him as particularly idyllic about his upbringing in the Tropics. His birthplace, a prosperous region of sugarcane plantations and restless ports at the turn of the century, today houses a spiritually stifling, high-tech industry. By the antillean standards, Ponce today has become a modern Cosmopolitan center. Consequently, Martínez incorporates more than a distilled conglomerate of Indian, European, and African heritage into his paintings—for the hyperbolic flora, the Caribbean seashore, the empyrean clouds, are all recurrent elements of a history longed for in the void that disappearance and exile have created.
His canvases convey metaphors of age and transition by sampling the picturesque
and the folkloric. (The
Illusion of Time Reflected In Our Faces).
Taíno Indian and Black African iconography, such as the ceremonial
masks coexist alongside the hallmarks of a Latin, sugarcane aristocracy represented
by a pompous, antique side chair. Within the constraint of insular globalization
one can still attain an exemplary compendium of eroticism and undisturbed
nature, as in Si Supieran (If They Only Knew).
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