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The Guardian
  

  Solo Show
Humberto Castro

Issue #69 Jun - Aug 2008
United States, Atlanta
Institution:
Naomi Silva Gallery

Ricardo Pau Llosa


In the work of Humberto Castro, the space that has always been a protagonist—one highly textured yet luminous, seductive, and subtle—plays a new role. The delicious paradoxes that populate Castro’s painting—mysterious raptures, sublimated dances, reflective acrobatics, germinating cages—reappear in these new works within an almost monochromatic space with a topography that amplifies figures and actions that seem to shrink in size. These new works operate under the understanding that emptiness suffers from visual timidity and consecrates whatever detail, tone, texture, or image reverberates in its realm. As such, consciousness bears no nothingness, and any space that alludes to absence will only amplify the intensity of whatever is located within it.
Humberto Castro was born in Cuba in 1957 and has lived in exile in Paris (for ten years) and in Miami and New York since 1989. In Havana, his paintings, engravings, drawings, and installations portrayed a vast array of characters and situations—Icarus and masks, minotaurs and metamorphic figures—that skillfully articulated a theatrical imagination. Central to his visual thinking has been a sense of action increasingly focused on essential elements without which time cannot be recorded in an image. In these recent works, compression gives way, in the paradoxical way that characterizes the artist’s work, not to reduction but the luxuriant texture of space.
In these works, the renewed textural immediacy shelters, and is in turn sheltered by, a rise in the intensity and complexity of the narrative. Throughout his career, Castro has displayed a sensibility for the theatrical in the best possible sense: theatricality as the implicit assertion that all visual images involve ideas, representations, and backgrounds with connotations and ramifications that go well beyond the sensory. But in these works, Castro refined and deepened the plots that blossom in his canvases.
In Leaving the Oasis, for example, a solitary sailor on a narrow, almost flat boat moves away from two trees. He traverses a river or pond, the fluid character of which is revealed only by the presence of the sailor himself. The oasis of the title is the suggestion of solid land left behind, inverting the meaning of the words: “oasis” implies a waterhole in the desert whereas the man is traveling on water, and it is dry land that he leaves behind in order to embrace the fluidity, perhaps the liberty, of his path. In El guardián, a male torso emerges from a tree trunk, surrounded by trees and holding a broken branch. Evoking myths from various heritages—from Yoruba animistic beliefs, to Humbaba in Gilgamesh, to Daphne—this man stands guard not only because he is a man but because he wishes to do so. And this type of desire, or of commitment to desire which is the essence of destiny and duty, arrives when consciousness intersects circumstance. This man is at once tree and man, and in consequence he watches over what he is and also over that which can’t survive on its own.
The titles of Castro’s works have always played a decisive role, but the artist reaches true poetic splendor in these new works. The titles point toward the Zen-like nature of these works, their simplicity and their paradoxical depth, in which characters sail or rest in spaces that are distilled landscapes and walls at the same time. As walls, they appear both nascent and eroded. As landscapes, they are also pages, entries into spaces known only to the mind and the imagination.
The key to Humberto Castro’s painting, what gives it unity and relevance, resides in sensuality. In previous periods, the crudeness of the gesture and the texture announced a visual ambition, while archetypal figures unfurled their passions and journeys on tightropes and roiling waters, conflicts that were as physical as they were psychological. In these works, absence is a labyrinth’s sigh, an instant’s breath that separates the protagonist from any exterior context and transforms him or her into the context. The fixity of the idea overflows into the instant turned into a landscape of the mind. Here, even the labyrinth, an image that emerged in Castro’s previous works, appears under the enveloping texture that dominates these paintings. The skin of the moment is the seal of the world on the mind, as the contemplative mind impresses, like a fingerprint, onto the visual.
 


 

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