Cat\u00e1logo exposici\u00f3n \u201cRare Paintings\u201d Fundaci\u00f3n Carlos Amberes, Madrid. Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM), Santo Domingo. National Gallery, Kingston. Museo del Canal Interoce\u00e1nico, Panam\u00e1. Museo de Arte (MARTE) San Salvador. Museo Antropo\u00f3logico y Arte Contempor\u00e1neo (MAAC), Guayaquil. Museo de Arte Contempor\u00e1neo (MAC), Santiago de Chile. Museo de Arte Moderno de Medell\u00edn (MAMM), Medell\u00edn. Abril 2008<\/p>\n
Donald Kuspit<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I venture to say that Jos\u00e9 Ciria is a great painter, by which I mean that he has complete command of his medium and means \u2014paint and the modernist vocabulary of abstraction, both gestural and geometrical. Planarity is inescapable \u2014the gospel truth of modernist painting\u2014 even as its flatness is animated by various surface \u201cevents\u201d: spattering, dripping, splashing, a certain flourish of brushwork, an exciting mixture of the refined and coarse, the elegant and gritty, making for Ciria\u2019s own unmistakable \u201csignature painting,\u201d as it has been called.<\/p>\n His use of black and red makes for a certain sense of drama, and his bold disjunctions and eccentric displacements \u2014for example, in Narciso, where the upper and lower figures are in abruptly distinct spaces, suggesting separate yet subliminally related realms of consciousness (the lower figure is uncannily foreshortened, a truncated version of the full-bodied upper figure)\u2014 carry the modernist notion of \u201cdynamic equilibrium\u201d to an extreme. In some works tones of gray vie with one another, in many works white radiates beyond the surface, however mottled by darker tones. The opposites mediate but never quite reconcile: some aspect of them may be commensurate, but the difference between them remains, sometimes starkly. For example, the Bailarinas have the same shape and diagonal thrust, but one is black and the other is red, however tempered by touches of gray. The circles, with their softer tones and luminous whites, unite them, and the atmosphere \u2014also colored a sort of tranquilizing yellow, as lyrically light in spirit as the surface of a subdued sea\u2014 embraces them with its softness, but they remain stubbornly at odds, however dancing together. Merger and intimacy are suggested, but separateness and conflict remain fundamental. The result is a sort of subjective tension whose objective correlative is the physical tension between the painterly elements that form and inform Ciria\u2019s surface. Ciria\u2019s handling is complexly primordial, and so are the emotions his work conveys.<\/p>\n There is clearly a strong element of fantasy in Ciria\u2019s paintings, as his figures show: let\u2019s call him an abstract fantasist, that is, he creates fantasy figures out of abstract elements, usually of gestural planes that seem to be in constant movement, suggesting a figure in metamorphic process. This brings me to the issue I want to address, because it is the issue that I think Ciria\u2019s La Guardia paintings address \u2014indeed, unflinchingly face and struggle to resolve. It is the inner ambition of his art; I think he succeeds, affording insight into the tragic condition of modern man and modern art by doing so. I am saying that his figures have a tragic presence \u2014Ciria\u2019s professed engagement with Malevich\u2019s Suprematism seems peripheral to me\u2014 and so does his modernist painting. I am saying that in effecting a \u201ccompromise formation\u201d between modernist painting and the human figure he reveals their tragic character. And the tragedy of modernity itself: with understated abstract eloquence, Ciria\u2019s Crucifixion conveys its lack of faith in anything but itself, that is, the collapse of the capacity for transcendence that comes from being modern \u2014transcendence in Erich Fromm\u2019s sense of evolving beyond the creaturely(1)\u2014 and with that its compensatory reliance on narcissistic primordiality, a sort of regressive delusion of instinctive grandeur.<\/p>\n I think Ciria\u2019s paintings brilliantly convey the modern failure of transcendental nerve even as they suggest the possibility of transcendence through modernist painterliness, that is, total immersion and complete identification with the fluid materiality of paint. It is something that occurs in Abstract Expressionism at its most intense \u2014in Ciria\u2019s Abstract Expressionism. Enchanted and transfixed by paint, the painter can use its energy to fuel his creativity, including his self-creation. Its oscillation between manic elation and melancholy inertia \u2014in Ciria ecstatic color and depressive grayness\u2014 is reflected in the changing rhythm of the painterliness. At the same time. Ciria\u2019s paintings make it clear that the so \u2014called pure\u2014 super-fine, Kandinsky called them \u2014feelings and sensations conveyed by pure abstraction, however ruthless and uncompromising, are unavoidably informed by impure feelings and raw sensations. Abstraction defends itself against them by becoming perfectionistic, or, to say this another way, a formulaic formalism\u2014 \u201cwild\u201d expressionistic painting can easily degenerate into a mechanical formula, signaling its exhaustion and emptiness, as the gestural paintings of Gerhard Richter show \u2014and with that becomes pseudo-transcendent and pseudo-vital. Ciria avoids this formalist trap by being hauntingly human: human presence precipitates out of abstract presence, conveying its tragic import, and underscoring the tragic, not to say morbid, character of modern man. I think Ciria\u2019s visionary paintings of a peculiarly aborted figure \u2014a figure simultaneously abstract and human, divided against itself, suggestive of its self-doubt, expressing its inability to integrate\u2014 reveal the inseparability of tragedy and transcendence.<\/p>\n The defining problem of modern art \u2014and its tragic import for art as a whole\u2014 was clearly stated by Kandinsky almost at its beginning. In 1912, in an essay \u201cOn the Question of Form,\u201d which appeared in Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, he wrote: \u201cThe forms employed for the embodiment [of the spirit], which the spirit has wrested from the reserves of matter, may easily be divided between two poles. These two poles are: 1. the Great Abstraction, 2. the Great Realism. Between these two poles lie many possible combinations of different juxtapositions of the abstract and the real. These two elements were always present in art and were to be characterized as the \u201cpurely artistic\u201d and \u201cobjective.\u201d The former expressed itself in the latter, while the latter served the former. An ever varying balancing act, which apparently sought to attain the ultimate Ideal by means of absolute equilibrium. And it seems that today one no longer sees in this ideal a goal to be pursued, as if the spring supporting the pans of the scale has disappeared, and the two scale-pans tend to lead a separate existence as self-sufficient entities, independent of each other. In this splitting up of the ideal scales, one again discerns \u201canarchy.\u201d Art has apparently put an end to the welcome complementation of the abstract by means of the objective and vice versa(2)\u201d.<\/p>\n For \u201cobjective\u201d read \u201chuman\u201d (and the human environment, including nature) and for \u201cpurely artistic\u201d read \u201cautonomous abstraction.\u201d Kandinsky has identified the basic problem of modern art \u2014the split that undermined it from within: in emphasizing the presence of the abstract at the expense of the presence of the human, more generally, handling at the expense of image\u2014 gesture, color, shape as such rather than as components of the figure or environment (manipulative sensitivity to pure form rather than projective and eventually empathic identification with the figure and its lifeworld) \u2014the human (when abstract art deigns to acknowledge it) deteriorates into a mnemonic trace, a sort of fossilized memory, its identity obscured and its body on the verge of decomposing into abstract parts. This is the hallucinatory form through which the human achieves uncanny presence in Ciria\u2019s paintings.<\/p>\n He renders modern man with existential accuracy: transcendence \u2014the hope for transcendence of the human condition implicit in every religious myth (the urge to become a \u201chigher,\u201d fully conscious being rather than remain bound to one\u2019s \u201clower\u201d needs and shadowy unconscious)\u2014 has been discredited by enlightened modernity, even as transcendence has shown its indifference to humanness by becoming completely abstract in art. The outcome is the bizarrely abstract \u2014quintessentially modern\u2014 \u201cfallen\u201d figures we see in Ciria\u2019s paintings, torn between the longing for the authentically human and for the transcendence afforded by abstraction. Ciria re-invents the human figure in abstract terms, in effect embodying \u2014the body, muted into colorless anonymity, is a recurrent theme in Ciria\u2019s visceral paintings\u2014 transcendence in tragic form. Fosfeno de figura, Figura adolescente, Figura Barroca, and Monociclista desequilibrado are among the many paintings that make the point clearly. The two ideas that Ciria is torn between in Entre dos ideas (Version II) are tragedy and transcendence \u2014or is it that the self\u2014 entangled imploding figure in the center, torn between darkness and light, is tragically transcendent? Even Paisaje con elementos I \u2014an inventive abstract landscape, with clashing planes of percussive color contained in a broad band that forms a kind of horizon, and an innovative use of the modernist grid, adding to the disjointed effect\u2014 has an elliptical center at odds with itself, suggesting that even nature is tainted by a tragic split.<\/p>\n Picasso, who was torn between Cubist abstraction, which distilled and elaborated Ce\u0301zanne\u2019s very modern anxiety \u2014it is what made his paintings \u201cclick\u201d for Picasso\u2014 and Classicism, which \u201creassured\u201d him, as he said, is the subject of Ciria\u2019s Mano Picasso. It is a gigantic, oppressive hand which epitomizes the issue: in Ciria\u2019s hands Picasso\u2019s hand becomes tragic and transcendental \u2014humanly meaningless and abstractly powerful\u2014 at once. In a sense, Ciria has castrated the hand \u2014and with that the creativity\u2014 of the greatest Spanish painter of modernity. While the hand has a solid \u201cclassical\u201d look, it is an abstract construction. For all its forbidding appearance, the picture as a whole conveys Cubist agitation leavened by later developments in pure abstraction.<\/p>\n The fingers of the hand move from white through gray to black (reading from left to right). The arm from which the hand emerges has the same range of colorless contrasts. Picasso\u2019s fingers seem petrified; their surface has a gritty stony look, giving them a certain ironic organicity. They are the fingers of death as well as creativity. The flat horizontal bar of black and red that they hold is much smoother, however marked by a small painterly flourish. The bar separates a light gray lower field, enlivened by signs of dark gray gestural turbulence \u2014a tentative eruption of molten impulse, a sort of slowly moving lava, vaguely threatening\u2014 from a higher field of bright colors, yellowish and green, from which the God-like hand of Picasso reaches down. The great hand has a tragic aura; the geometrical bar \u2014it splits the picture\u2014 is abstractly pure. Picasso\u2019s hand grasps the geometrical bar, but cannot bend it to his creative will. But the split in the transcendental geometry \u2014the striking difference between the red and black, conveying a serious lack of balance, the flaw of disequilibrium in the midst of geometrical perfection\u2014 codifies the tragic split that is the expressive substance of the work.<\/p>\n Ciria\u2019s La Guardia paintings convey an uneasy reconciliation of abstraction and figuration, the purely artistic and the objectively human. They suggest that abstraction must recapitulate its history through figuration, and figuration must recapitulate its history through figuration. This would allow both to achieve a new modernity. One might say that Ciria\u2019s paintings give us a \u201cpeak experience\u201d \u2014Abraham Maslow\u2019s term\u2014 of tragic transcendence. That is, he makes the tragedy latent in transcendence manifest and the transcendence latent in tragedy manifest. He does this by fusing high abstraction and human alienation. The ambition of his paintings is to humanize abstraction and show that human beings have become shadows of themselves in modernity, and as such self-alienated abstractions. The fact that modern man unconsciously regards himself as a machine in human disguise \u2014the sort of quasi-organic machine\u2014 like figure, grim with anonymity, that Ciria constructs, emblematic of the indifference to the human that pervades modernity, confirming that becoming human remains an unrealized evolutionary project \u2014indicates as much. Ciria\u2019s paintings are a triumph of existential insight even as they remain consummately abstract.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 2. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 242.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cat\u00e1logo exposici\u00f3n \u201cRare Paintings\u201d Fundaci\u00f3n Carlos Amberes, Madrid. Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM), Santo Domingo. National Gallery, Kingston. Museo del Canal Interoce\u00e1nico, Panam\u00e1. Museo de Arte (MARTE) San Salvador. Museo Antropo\u00f3logico y Arte Contempor\u00e1neo (MAAC), Guayaquil. Museo de Arte Contempor\u00e1neo (MAC), Santiago de Chile. Museo…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8740"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8740"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11278,"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8740\/revisions\/11278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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