TEOLOGÍA DEL COLOR
Los antiguos griegos hacían clara distinción entre los teólogos y los teurgos, entre quienes sumisamente interpretan, en los papiros y los ostraca, en los vuelos de las aves y en la irisación más o menos violácea de los hígados sacrificados, los dictados y las leyes divinas, y quienes, por el contrario, poseídos de una desaforada hybris, convocan los poderes celestiales e, imperiosamente, los conminan a manifestarse bajo su edicto inapelable. En la Religión del Color, Arturo Guerrero es, sin duda, un teurgo, un sumo sacerdote, que participa de los atributos del mago y del demiurgo, seres que tienen por común la capacidad de crear de la nada, al haber sustraído a los mismos dioses el ¡fiat! que desencadena toda creación.
Arturo Guerrero cree a pies juntillas que, en un mundo primigenio y supralunar, los hombres formaban parte intrínseca de un alto Dios del Color y que, por su malhacer o su descaro, se vieron de Él disociados (como los neoplátonicos creían haber estado alguna vez unidos a su media esfera y consumían la existencia a la espera de un anhelado e improbable reencuentro) y ahora vagan por el mundo en desaliento, incapaces de encontrar reposo ni quiescencia en cosa o color alguno. No de otra forma se puede entender la concentración casi chamánica con la que Arturo Guerrero se afana sobre sus colorespigmentos sencillos, simples, de una modestia casi artesana, tubos que aguardan turno ansiosos, apilados sobre las rústicas estanterías de su estudio de Brooklyn; no de otra manera la furia con que los somete a sus encantamientos, a sus ordalías, a su nigromancia casi satánica de alquimista neoyorkino, ataviado para la ceremonia de ropajes lastrados de goterones; no de otra guisa la petrificante mirada con que los ordena estarse quietos sobre linos y papeles, la autoridad con la que se deshacen a su vista, vanamente aferrados a las fibras.
A Arturo Guerrero hace tiempo que los colores han dejado de resistírsele. Salen de su mano, dóciles, se hermanan, se amanceban, resplandecen, se dan la espalda, se quejan a veces, pelean, chirrían, protestan, como hermanos celosos, decididos a ocupar la mayor parte del lienzo, unos en detrimento de los otros. “¡Como vaya para allá os vais a enterar!”, parece exclamar entonces, desde la vieja silla de brazos, su creador absorto. Pero pronto son escuchados, estudiados, rectificados, reubicados, enérgicamente barajados, diluidos: dos encantamientos, realizados con brochas casi prehistóricas, un salvaje bautismo de agua helada y la paz se hace: sólo entonces los colores reposan y su exhausto demiurgo obtiene, por unas horas, un poco de paz; efímera, no obstante: a quienes los dioses dan poderes, entregan también fusta nominal, que no permite otro reposo que el que da el clemente sueño.
Arturo Guerrero viaja tanto como pinta, fotografía, mira, remira, graba en su retina prodigiosa, impregna incansable papeles a cientos de maravilloso verjurado, expone en varios continentes. Pero no nos engañemos: sus lugares no son tan importantes. Él sólo aspira nada menos a convertir a la forma, al motivo, al discurso, al coleccionista, al marchante, al portero, al taxista, al ocasional viandante, a toda criatura, a la Adoración del Color. Sus esplendorosas pinturas pueden creerse la Ciudad Prohibida, la cegadora Creta o incluso el crepuscular Manhattan, roído por las ratas. Da igual, sus motivos son categorías, accidentes, no así sus cuadros, gemas siempre etéreas, hiperbóreas, entelequias aristotélicas, que hablan de un mundo superior, atravesadas por un hilo de Color, que las engarza, les da sentido y que, anudándolas, desata su belleza.
Quizás, no obstante, éstos sean tiempos duros para el Altísimo Color. Muchos humanos, ¡ay!, han dado la espalda al intratable Cromos y escenifican ritos paganos, en los que adoran dioses escitas y enrarecen los viejos templos con sahumerios asfixiantes y mitraicos. Es en esos momentos, escasos, de sagrado desánimo, en los que Arturo Guerrero, evangelizador de regiones bárbaras, pierde su compostura de teurgo y adquiere un vago aire ausente de profeta, un cansado Profeta del Color que clama, como todos los profetas, esperando un amainar del rigor divino.
Y no es extraño. Al contemplar la obra de Arturo Guerrero uno barrunta que, en verdad, en verdad, el Reino del Color está cerca.
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Jaime Sánchez Ratia
Geneve 2007
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A THEOLOGY OF COLOR
The ancient Greeks made a clear distinction between theologoi and theurgoi: those who, on the one hand, submissively interpret, from papuroi and ostraka, from the flights of birds or from the more or less violet iridescence of sacrificial entrails, the dictates of the gods, and those who, on the other hand, possessed by boundless hubris, summon the powers of the heavens and compel them, imperiously, by an unappealable edict, to manifest themselves. In the Religion of Color, Arturo Guerrero is, without question, a theurgos - a high priest who shares the attributes of the magus and the demiurge, naturally able to create out of nothing, having stolen from those same gods the fiat! that unleashes all creation.
Arturo Guerrero believes wholeheartedly that, in a primeval and supralunar world, men were an intrinsic part of a supreme God of Color and that, through their misdeeds or their brazenness, they found themselves separated from Him (just as the Neoplatonics believed they were once united to their hemisphere and spent their existence yearning for an unlikely reunion) and now wander the world dejected, restless and unable to find repose in any thing or any color. No other explanation can be found for the almost shamanic concentration with which Arturo Guerrero toils over his colors – subtle, simple pigments, of an almost craftsman-like modesty, tubes that await their turn, anxious, piled up on the rustic shelves of his Brooklyn studio; there is no other way to understand the fury with which he puts them under his spells, his trials by ordeal, his New York alchemist’s near-satanic necromancy, dressed up as he is for the ceremony in cloaks weighed down by large splotches; in no other manner can we grasp the petrifying glance with which he commands them to remain still on cloth and paper, and the authority with which they become undone at his sight, vainly clinging to the fibers.
Colors have long stopped resisting Arturo Guerrero. Docile in his hands, they are entwined, coupled, they glimmer, they turn their backs on each other, sometimes they complain, they fight, screech, grunt like jealous brothers intent on occupying most of the canvas to one another’s detriment. “Don’t make me come and get you!”, their entranced creator seems to warn them from his old armchair. But soon they are listened to, studied, straightened out, moved around, energetically jumbled, diluted: two spells are cast by brushes from some prehistoric age, then a savage baptism in icy water, and a peace is reached: only then do colors find repose and their exhausted demiurge earns a few hours of ephemeral peace: those empowered by the gods are also entrusted with a virtual whip which allows for no other rest than that of their clement slumber.
Arturo Guerrero travels as much as he paints, photographs, watches, stares, records things in his prodigious retina, untiringly impregnates hundreds of wondrous textured papers, goes on exhibits on several continents. But be not fooled: where all this happens is not so important. His only aspiration – and it is not a minor one - is to turn form, motif, discourse, the collector, the art dealer, the doorman, the cabdriver, the occasional passer-by - every creature - toward the Adoration of Color. His resplendent paintings can be considered the Forbidden City itself or blinding Crete or even Manhattan at twilight, gnawed at by rats. It makes no difference: his motifs are categories, accidents, but not so his pictures, ever-ethereal, hyperboreal gems, Aristotelic entelechies that speak of a higher world, transpierced by a thread of Color that strings them together, gives them meaning and, in joining them, unravels their beauty.
Yet these may be hard times for Almighty Color. Alas, many humans have turned their backs on intractable Chromos and stage pagan rites in which they worship Scythian gods and fill old temples with asphyxiating Mitraic incense. In those rare moments of sacred discouragement, Arturo Guerrero, evangelizer of barbaric regions, loses his composure as theurgos and takes on the vaguely absent air of a prophet, a tired Prophet of Color who cries out, as do all prophets, as they wait for divine rigor to subside.
This should come as no surprise. To contemplate Arturo Guerrero’s work is to sense that, in truth, in truth, the Kingdom of Color is near.
*****
Jaime Sánchez Ratia
Geneve 2007
Translated into English by John David Werner and Chema Perazzo
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LA MIRADA CICLÓPEA DE ARTURO GUERRERO
Lo que más sorprende del pintor Arturo Guerrero es la forma en que mira sus propios cuadros. Está fuera de duda que los pintores podrían clasificarse según la manera de mirar su propia obra. Los hay que la atisban de reojo, como si las pinturas, pasadas semanas o meses desde su plasmación sobre el lienzo, todavía suscitasen recelos y temores (pues las telas empiezan a hablar cuando se secan y ya no dejan nunca de hacerlo). Los hay que contemplan sus cuadros divertidos: su visión trae al autor recuerdos felices de cosas que uno no sabe y que no sabrá jamás. Otros, los más, echan sobre sus obras miradas entre suplicántes y lastimosas, algo melancólicas, en las que brilla una borrosa fustración por todo lo que el cuadro iba a ser y que, al final, no ha sido; hay, por fín, pintores -a menudo grandes por qué no- que no miran nunca sus cuadros, al menos no ante testigos, como hay novelistas que no leen jamás sus obras. Sus telas son como hijos bastardos, aparecidos en plena cena para reclamar su parte en la herencia. Arturo Guerrero, en cambio, arroja sobre sus cuadros miradas ciclópeas, tensas y estáticas, que parecen penetrar en las más íntimas fibras de la tela o en las verjuras del papel, y que fascinan por su intensidad y aliento. Uno comprende entonces que, en esas miradas de Gorgona, que parecen petrificar los mismos pigmentos, descordar la tela, hacer gemir de tensión a las doscientas grapas de cada bastidor, se encuentra el secreto de la soberbia plasticidad de su pintura, de su perfecta composición y, sobre todo, de la inmanente atemporalidad que, como toda obra clásica, desprenden sus lienzos, unas telas sobre las que parece haber pasado un terremoto de aguas, disolventes, ácidos, clavos, brochazos, escobazos y me atrevería incluso a decir que bofetadas y trastazos, pero que siguen como impertérritas a semejante trato, como esos santos románicos que han resistido a los embates del tiempo. Porque Arturo Guerrero, en su compleja técnica pictórica, no desdeña siquiera las escobillas de inodoro: su concepto es tan vasto y avasallador, tan alejado de la técnica tradicional del pintor de caballete que, aunque se le dejara solo en una habitación desnuda, -como al preso díscolo al que se encierra en una celda húmeda- sería capaz de salir de la penumbra tras haber dejado las paredes embadurnadas de frescos, pintados quién sabe con qué pigmentos, con ayuda de qué luz.
Tras unos inicios fulgurantes en los mejores años de Madrid y un breve silencio plástico, que no de actividad creadora, que le mantuvo alejado de las salas, Arturo Guerrero ha atravesado los desiertos de la gran Nueva York, esta metrópolis del arte que, a fuerza de querer estar siempre en vanguardia, se ha vuelto, ay, algo reacia a la pintura imprescindible. Como todo artista verdadero, ha dejado atrás épocas en las que cruzó a pie las sombrías llanuras del desaliento, los calveros de la indiferencia, que nadó los rápidos de la ansiedad creadora, las duras insolaciones de la pintura amontonada y guardada, años en que suspiró incluso ante los cuadros archivados, luminosos hasta en la oscuridad de los grandes archivadores, llegando a hacer recuento de sus enseres, sus pinturas y sus telas, como un Robinson que atesora botones y fruslerías. Pero los desiertos tambien limitan con la fronda y hasta el mítico Rubaa-al-Jali tiene sus orillas: quienes de ellas surgen, aterrados y sudorosos, ya no son nunca los mismos, porque la creación solitaria destruye a los artistas mediocres y robustece a los grandes, de la misma forma que –parafraseando a La Rochefoucauld, en su sentencia sobre la distancia y el amor- el viento apaga las bujías y aviva las grandes hogueras.
Arturo Guerrero lleva ya varios años instalado en el oasis creativo de su taller de Broadway, trajinando con todo tipo de pigmentos, baldeando sus obras como un naúfrago, clavando escuadras, montando inmensos lienzos, preparando él solo superficies grandes como cangrejas, experimentando con nuevos colores y tonalidades –siempre sorprendentes-, combinando cromías maravillosas, pintando en lienzos y papeles de todos los tamaños y formas, descomponiendo sus obras en miríadas de fragmentos, como si fueran puzzles de frescos maravillosos, pintados en no se sabe que capillas, o al revés, agrandándolas y recomponiéndolas como castillos de naipes que no se desmoronan sino para ser guardados, nunca porque su estabilidad amenace ruina. A diferencia de épocas anteriores, ya no se centra en una sola temática, sino que se afana en varias a la vez, sin que unas interfieran en el dearrollo de otras. Su inmensa obra –cuya catalogación debe costar a su marchante sus buenas horas de empleados- es prueba de la titánica labor que ha desarrollado, bajo la luz de sus deslumbrantes focos, a lo largo de estos años.
Desde sus primeras exposiciones y catálogos, en los felices y ya lejanos ochenta, sus cuadros han ido marcando, en su travesía serena y rectilínea, a veces nocturna, a veces diurna, una derrota salpicada de islas de ensueño: ciudades fantasmagóricas, casi oníricas, vagamente paulkleenianas; bodegones románticos, salpicados de enseres cotidianos, provistos de una mágica textura, de una hiperbórea utilidad, como listos para servir en una vida mejor, que aún está por llegar; series jeroglíficas, en las que los animales y las pequeñas cosas conviven en hileras, conformando una escritura, que parece aguardar brillante su champollion menudo, que le dará sentido y elaborará su compleja gramática, llena de verbos de colores, de morfemas pincel y de adjetivos disolvente; y qué decir de su poderosa investigación de la ruina, en sus series de Knossos, donde la pintura parecía haber sido mezclada en la misma Creta y los pigmentos hablaban lineal A: una soberbia exploración de la melancolía.
Arturo Guerrero presenta en esta su decimocuarta exposición –la primera en Nueva York- una breve pero intensa selección de sus nuevos hallazgos, en parte reelaboraciones de temas antiguos –que parecía que ya no podían dar más de sí-, en parte motivos novedosos en su trayectória pictórica. La diversidad de la muestra debe relacionarse con la naturaleza de su creación, en esencia arbórea: unos temas dan origen a otros. Por ello, me atrevo a predecir que –al contrario que en la mayoría de los pintores- su temática será cada vez más diversa, más frondosa. Los diminutos jeroglíficos son ahora formas geométricas más poderosas, más megalíticas; se diría que, tras una revuelta, se han apoderado de sus volúmenes y que ahora componen un Tratado Universal de Buena Vecindad del Color. No es de extrañar: quienes han atravesado el desierto conocen cien palabras para decir simplemente arena. En estas impresionantes series en papel viven colores para los que en ninguna lengua existe nombre. Alguien debería bautizarlos con paciencia: obra de académicos verdaderos, que queda siempre para otro rato. Tambien presenta sus mujeres, enigmáticas hembras rapadas, a veces enfrentadas entre sí, amagando un beso –¿parloteantes?-, como ídolos yorubas aplastados sobre el papel, otras inquisitivas, mirando fijamente al espectador, mujeres quizás enfermas, ocres, marroninegras, majestuosas, poderosamente sexuales. Presenta tambien algunos bodegones, suculentos platos mediterráneos –en los que refulgen calamares que se adivinan en su punto-, esperando humeantes a unos comensales que parecen estar de viaje, lejos de los manteles rayados: no son naturalezas muertas, sino retratos de la vida en otra parte. Quizás de la vida aquí, entre las formidables cordilleras de ladrillos de Manhattan. Y qué decir de sus series de peces, sobre las que ha seguido trabajando estos últimos meses. Su imaginación es tan sumergible como su pintura.
Pienso que en Arturo Guerrero, que tiene todos sus cuadros colgados de las mamparas de su retina, batallan dos fuerzas contrarias: su impulso generoso de que todo el mundo comparta y viva su obra y la irresistíble necesidad de seguir mirando sus telas y papeles. Quizás sea su mirada la que le encadena a sus obras: la vida pasa, el tiempo no ceja y las personas nos zambullimos, como dijera un poeta, en la ciénaga de la muerte, pero las miradas de los que miran, en un mundo en donde pocos miran, quedan para siempre. Arturo Guerrero vive de mirar. Su oficio es otra cosa, más mundana, más sudorosa: conseguir trasladar sus miradas a sus lienzos. Los resultados están a la vista.
Siempre he sospechado que Arturo Guerrero, de ser hombre de inmensa fortuna, colgaría sus obras en un grandioso alcázar y se dedicaría a pasear solo por sus silenciosos aposentos, las manos en los bolsillos, arrojando sobre sus lienzos acendradas miradas de cíclope, con las que iría levantando, trazo a trazo, cota a cota, la vasta cartografía de su mundo iridescente.
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Jaime Sánchez Ratia
New York 1998
THE CYCLOPS' EYE OF ARTURO GUERRERO
The most surprising thing about the painter Arturo Guerrero is the way he looks at his own paintings. It is beyond a doubt that painters can be classified according to their ways of looking at their own works. There are those who peep at them out of the corner of their eye, as if the paintings, weeks or months after taking shape on the canvas, still harbor suspicions and fears (since canvases begin to speak as soon as they dry and never stop). There are those who contemplate their paintings with pleasure: seeing them brings back happy memories that others don't share and never will. Others, and they are in the majority, cast an eye at their works somewhere between pleading and sorrowful, even melancholy, with a vaguely smouldering frustration over all that the picture was going to be and, in the end, was not; finally there are the painters -and often great ones- who never look at their own works, at least not in front of witnesses, just as there are novelists who never read their own books. Their canvases are like bastard sons appearing in the middle of dinner to demand their share of the inheritance. Arturo Guerrero on the other hand, cast a Cyclops' eye, tense and ecstatic, on his works, that appears to penetrate the very threads of the canvas or fibres of the paper, fascinating in intensity and strength, and reveals, in this Gorgon's gaze, which seems to petrify the very pigments, unravel the canvas and make the two hundred staples of each stretcher moan with tension, the secret of the superb plasticity of his painting, his perfect composition and, above all, the immanent timelessness that, as in any classic work, distinguishes his paintings. Some of the canvases seem as if they had been subjected to an earthquake of waters, solvents, acids, nails, brushstrokes and swipes with a broom, and I would even venture to say blows and bumps, but remain impervious to such treatment, like those romanesque santos which have resisted the buffeting of time. Because Arturo Guerrero, in his complex painting technique, would not be above using even a toilet brush: his concept of painting is so vast and overpowering, so far removed from the traditional technique of a painter at an easel that, even if he were left alone in a bare room -like an unruly prisoner locked up in a damp cell- he would be capable of coming out of the shadows after leaving the walls covered in frescos, painted who knows how, with who knows what pigments, under who knows what light.
After brilliant beginnings in the best years in Madrid and a brief artistic silence (thought not creative inactivity) which kept him away from the galleries, Arturo Guerrero has crossed the great desert of New York, this metropolis of art, which, by wanting always to be at the leading edge, has become a bit reluctant to accept essential painting. Like any true artist, he has gone through periods when he trudged across the gloomy plains of discouragement and through the clearings of indifference, shot the rapids of creative anxiety, endured the scorching sun of paintings piled up and put away, years in which he sighed over shelved paintings, shining even in the darkness of the great files. taking an inventory of his equipment, paintings and canvases, like a Robinson Crusoe who amasses buttons and knicknacks. Deserts end in oases, and even the Empty Quarter has its own boundaries: those who emerge from them, scruffy and sweaty, are never the same, because solitary creation destroys mediocre artists and strengthens great ones, in the same way that, to paraphrase La Rochefoucauld in his definitive statement on distance and love, the wind extinguishes a spark and makes a bonfire blaze.
For a number of years Arturo Guerrero has been installed in the creative oasis of his Broadway studio, rushing about with all kinds of pigments, washing down his works like a shipwrecked sailor bailing out his sinking lifeboat, hammering frames, mounting immense canvases, preparing by himself surfaces the size of sails, experimenting with always surprising new colors and tonalities, combining marvelous hues, painting on canvases and paper of all sizes and shapes, deconstructing his works into a myriad of fragments, as if they were puzzles pieces of marvelous frescoes, painted in an unknown chapel, or else enlarging them and building them into structures like a house of cards, which collapse only to be preserved, never because their stability threatens ruin. Unlike earlier periods, he is not centered on a single theme, but displays several at a time, without one interfering in the development of the others. His immense body of work -cataloguing it will cost his dealer quite a few hours of work- is proof of the titanic labor he has done, under his blinding spotlights, throughout these years.
Since his first exhibits and catalogues, in the golden and long-ago eighties, his paintings have continued on their serene and rectilinear way, sometimes by night, sometimes by day, along a route dotted with islands out of a daydream: fantasmagorical cities, almost oneiric, vaguely like something out of Paul Klee, romantic still lifes sprinkled with everyday households items endowed with a magical texture, a Hyperborean usefulness, as if ready to serve in a better life still to come; hieroglyphic series in which animals and small objects cohabit in lines, forming a new writing which seems to await, shining, its new Champollion, who will give meaning to it and explain its complex grammar, full of color words, paintbrush morphemes and solvent adjectives; and his powerful investigation of ruins in his Knossos series, where the paint appears to have been mixed in Crete itself and the pigments speak Linear A: a superb exploration of melancholy.
In this his fourteenth exhibition and his first individual show in New York, Arturo Guerrero is presenting a small but intense selection of his new works, partly reworkings of old themes which appeared as if they could not be carried any further, and partly innovative motifs in his pictorial trajectory. The diversity of the exhibition must be related to the essentially arboreal nature of his creativity: some themes give birth to others. Therefore, I dare to predict that, contrary to the majority of painters, his thematic material will branch out even more, becoming even more diverse. The tiny hieroglyphics are now more powerful, more megalithic geometrical forms; as if, after a revolution, they have given full powers to their volumes and are now compiling a Universal Treaty of Good Neighborly Relations among Colors. That should not be surprising: those who have crossed the desert know a hundred words for sand. In this impressive series on paper, there are colors that have no name in any language. Someone should have the patience to christen them; that would be a job for a true academic, always left for another time. He is also showing his women, enigmatic shaven females, sometimes facing one another, looking like they are kissing -or chatting?- like Yoruba idols flattened onto the paper, others are inquisitive, looking firmly at the viewer, women who perhaps are sick, ochre, brown and black, majestic, powerfully sexual. He is also showing some still lifes, succulent Mediterranean platters containing splendid squid which seems always to be done à point- awaiting, steaming, some dinner guests who appear to be travelling, far from the striped table linens: these are not nature morte, but portraits of life elsewhere. Perhaps from life here among the imposing brick mountain ranges of Manhattan. And now to describe his series of fish, which he has been working on in recent months? His imagination is as submersible as his painting.
I think that within Arturo Guerrero, who has all his paintings hung on the inside of his retina, there is a struggle between two opposing forces: his generous impulse to allow everyone to share and experience his works, and the irresistible need to continue looking at them. Perhaps it is his gaze which chains him to his works: life goes on, time does not cease and we, like all people, as a poet would say, plunge in to the swamp of death, but the gaze of those who look at things, in a world where very few people really do, remains forever. Arturo Guerrero lives through his eyes. His trade is another thing, more mundane and sweaty: to manage to translate what he sees onto his canvases. The results are here on view.
I have always suspected that Arturo Guerrero, if he had a huge fortune, would hang his works in a grand fortress and spend his time strolling alone through its silent rooms, hands in his pockets, casting his pure Cyclops' gaze on his paintings, with which he would go about erecting, stroke by stroke, contour by contour, the vast map of his iridescent world.
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Jaime Sánchez Ratia
New York 1998
Translation into english by Mary Ellen Lavin