El Nuevo Herald

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Posted on Sunday, May 22, 2005 

Painting as Contemplation: Miguel Loredo

Alejandro Anreus

 Especial/El Nuevo Herald

“When I see through the canvas – when I see through the wall – what shall I see in the canvas, what shall I see in the wall? The Absolute.”

Piet Mondrian, 1919

          Even if it seems extremely radical, I will begin by stating that the authentically spiritual religious painting of the Western tradition, the one that is contemplative, ceases to exist after Fra Angelico and his contemporaries, sometime after 1455. What comes after is essentially a visual manifestation of religion as culture, not contemplative and authentic spirituality. Of course, there are exceptions: Donatello’s Penitent Magdalene, all of Bernini, Zurbarán and Rembrandt. That which is authentically spiritual, what we might define as visual ecstasies, optical contemplation, hides, even gets lost and does not reappear until we encounter the work of that divested and tormented mystic of the 19^th century: Van Gogh. This authentic spirituality appears in the 20^th century in the great abstractionists: Mondrian, Malevich, Arp, Brancusi, Rothko, and Reinhardt, to name the most significant ones. I am obviously excluding a figurative painter like Georges Rouault, who worked within the traditional iconography of Catholicism. The irony is that Rouault’s best work, the one where his intensity of spirit comes across, is the work on paper, whose content is a critical vision of the corruption of the world. His traditional saints are mere decorations. The traditional iconography of religious art becomes problematic in the modern world.

In the early 1950s the neo-Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson gave a series of lectures at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. Eventually these lectures were published under the title “Painting and Reality,” and in them he made a very audacious proposal. Gilson stated that after the horrors of World War II (concentration camps, atomic bomb) the image of the human figure had been permanently mutilated and that due to this it would be extremely difficult to use the figure as a vehicle for the spiritual in the visual arts. Only abstract painting, as difficult as it is profound, remained the “open field” for the supernatural. Since 1909 the Dutch painter Mondrian was aware of this and pursued it. In his quest he would find support in theosophy, the religions of the East, even in jazz, and eventually he would convert to Catholicism shortly before his death, while in exile in New York. For Mondrian Catholicism was “at the same time the most ancient and most contemporary of religions, which embraced everything, from theosophy to eastern contemplation, and abstract art.” In this same journey of abstraction and spirituality we find the Russian Malevich, the Check Kupka, the sculptors Brancusi and Arp, as well as the American Mark Rothko. Today a handful of artists insert themselves in this tradition, such as Brice Marden and William T. Williams.

The challenge of the post-modern period in which we live lies in creating a visual vocabulary that achieves what Fra Angelico and his contemporaries did: to open, visually, a space for, towards contemplation. I believe, like Gilson, that today only abstract painting can achieve this. And it is in this context that we encounter Miguel Loredo. I knew of Loredo for many years, going back to my years of political militancy on behalf of political prisoners in Cuba. Loredo was one of the thousands whose unconditional freedom we demanded. In 1994 during a visit to Puerto Rico, Carlos Franqui spoke to me of Loredo as a first rate poet who possessed an extraordinary visual sensibility. A couple of years ago it was another friend, that curatorial dynamo from Lehigh University, Ricardo Viera that mentioned Loredo to me and facilitated our meeting at his Pennsylvania home. I must admit that when I first heard that Loredo painted, I was a bit skeptical. I thought to myself: a Franciscan friar who is a good poet and also paints – this does not sound believable to me. I saw a couple of his paintings in reproduction and to tell the truth, they made no impression on me. It was not until I visited him at his parish, Saint Francis in New York City, and visited his studio, that I stopped looking and started to see. I became aware of the fact that Miguel Loredo is a poet and painter who is also a Franciscan friar, not a priest who paints. Since the very beginning Miguel Loredo has known what Mondrian sensed and accepted at the end of his life; everything is embraced and transformed by the Absolute.

We all look at the visual phenomena that surround us everyday. Few of us overcome looking and begin to see. To see is a meditative and profound act, usually very difficult, almost always impossible. More than three hours at Loredo’s studio, seeing works on paper and on canvas, conversing and being silent, made possible in me what James Joyce called an epiphany. For Joyce an epiphany was an electric moment in which an acknowledgement took place, a profound comprehension at both an emotional and intellectual level.

Loredo’s canvases are in a process of evolution – each step they take they take becomes broader, and recently they are making giant leaps. This was already taking place in his work on paper, where graphite, ink and minimal touches of watercolor open up the whiteness of space, thereby creating a surface of austere sensuality. Here the stain and the line sing to each other and our vision is purified. I dare say that drawing is difficult, incredibly so. Visually drawing is the equivalent of poetry. The late Octavio Paz stated on many occasions that as a poet he envied the prose and paragraphs of the novelist the way a draftsman envies the texture and colors of the painter. Paz would add that the poet and the draftsman placed a substantial wager on the white sheet, that the poem and the drawing both posses a terrifying nakedness. Loredo’s drawings have this; a terrifying nakedness, intense brushstrokes and lines inhabiting silence. They do not break silence, but open it to the viewer.

In the last two years Loredo’s canvases have been in a process of purification. They are acquiring formal rigor and density of content. Painted with “media pasta” and light veils of turpentine, these paintings posses a palette that has much in common with Spanish painting of the 17^th century; Prussian blues, silvery grays, browns and tans, olive green and a black that ranges from iciness to fire. The canvases are doing what the work on paper has been doing for some time. They jump, take a leap. Children jump with joy and when they are at play; this is pure intuition. Both Pascal and Kierkegaard make constant references in their writings to the leap of faith that the heart or soul must make in order to escape from the prison of rationalism and make contact with God; this is the courage of the mystics. A courageous intuition, visually resolved is what is taking place in “the leap’ of Miguel Loredo’s paintings. His painting is concerned with situating the viewer feet firmly planted on the ground and eyes on the canvas – this places the human being between earth and infinity. Then the canvas is the window towards the Absolute. Today’s viewers are drowning in the irony of post-modernity, they are disoriented by the noise of consumerism, and they are exhausted like astronauts that have been forgotten in outer space. These paintings transform these viewers into participants, from individuals into persons that dare to leap with the painting, to the point that they may loose a bit of their fear and open up to the Absolute.

Much of what passes for abstract painting today is muddled and confusing. Miguel Loredo’s paintings clarify, while the other is frigid, his is moving, while the other is active, Loredo’s is calming. Let us not forget that what this friar is doing is painting, made with strong and intense colors, never light or primary. His compositions are simple and direct, never simplistic or decorative. Content gives substance to his pictorial activity, but his vocabulary is the visual one of painting. The most significant spiritual and philosophical ideas are not worth a damn in the fine arts unless an authentic visuality exists, consisting of both craftsmanship and originality. Goya already said it in the 19^th century: “to paint is to do battle.” Loredo engages in this pictorial battle with the joy and open courage of the Franciscan friar that he is.

The so-called “New York School” created a painting defined by the critics as “action painting” – a painting of action. Miguel Loredo does the opposite; contemplative painting. And what is this if not a space, openness towards the Absolute?

© 2005 El Nuevo Herald and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

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El Nuevo Herald, Miami, 6 June 2004

Constancia de la luz

 La obra pictórica de Miguel Loredo

Vicente Echerri

La tierra es siempre oscura —negra más bien— y siempre constituye la base, el soporte por así decir, desde donde el cuadro asciende en busca de la luz que puede expresarse en una gama cromática de colores cálidos —rojos, ocres— o en otra en que predominan los azules y grises. El óleo que se integra al lienzo —o al lino— haciendo desaparecer la pincelada, deja empero hendiduras, deliberadas grietas, segmentos donde se intensifica la luz en el color natural de la tela. Aquí y allá se advierten unos traumáticos goteos que disuelven o rematan borrosamente ciertos límites. Sin embargo, esta pintura que ya le empieza a dar nombre a Miguel Loredo no comunica ni esfuerzo ni congoja; por el contrario, regocija, transmite el júbilo con que su autor se entrega a su creación que para él, en la etapa en que ahora mismo se encuentra, consiste en atrapar el diario viaje de la luz, de naciente a poniente, que perdura en su imaginación y en su mirada aún después que anochece.

Loredo (La Habana, 1938) ha pintado desde niño; y muy pronto, en su ciudad natal, conoce y trata a algunos de los pintores cubanos que se destacan por su ruptura con las convenciones de la academia (Milían, Mijares, Portocarrero). Rolando López-Dirube va más lejos y se convierte en una especie de mentor que lo invita a trabajar en su estudio. Así empieza su viaje, más peregrinación espiritual que carrera artística, en el sentido mundano con que tan frecuentemente se usa este término; viaje que se realiza, casi siempre, en un entorno austero: seminario, prisión política, convento. Aunque viene a mostrar sus obras hace muy poco tiempo (en una exposición para honrar la memoria de las víctimas del 11 de septiembre), la pintura no constituye para Loredo una segunda naturaleza, un divertimento circunstancial, una tarea subalterna… Sin menoscabo alguno para su ministerio pastoral (ni para su labor de activista en pro de los derechos humanos en Cuba), Loredo no es un fraile que pinta; sino un pintor que se toma muy en serio y quien resulta, además, ser fraile.

Dibujante notable, su obra fue durante años fecundamente figurativa. Aunque apenas si conserva cuadros anteriores a su etapa más reciente, docenas de fotos dan testimonio de esa trayectoria en la que, como es usual, se aprecian influencias de muchos maestros; influencias que se van decantando en la medida en que refina su propia expresión: una manera de operar, una aplicación del color, una búsqueda que lo identifica. Aunque Loredo afirma que para él “no existe una gran diferencia entre pintura figurativa y abstracta”, en esa búsqueda se aleja definitivamente de lo figurativo y de lo policromo para sumergirse en la abstracción donde siempre perdura un reflejo del mundo, un mundo que se descompone en tonos de una misma gama que, sin embargo, nada tienen que ver con la monotonía, porque se perciben animados por un dinamismo, por una energía luminosa. Si hay que incluir a Miguel Loredo entre los pintores abstractos, la suya es una abstracción metafísica, resultado de una indagación interior que lo induce al desasimiento, al abandono de los valores adjetivos para centrarse en las esencias, en la fidelidad a un impulso que tiende hacia la luz, hacia una suerte de centro de irradiación cósmica (como bien lo ilustra “Tangencia No. 3”, uno de los cuadros de la muestra de sus obras expuestas recientemente —del 25 de marzo al 17 de abril— en Ginebra).

Loredo se confiesa admirador de los rasgos de algunos pintores: “los dibujos de Leonardo, la dinámica de Lam, el mensaje espiritual de Gauguin y el color puro y seductor de Joseph Marioni”. Este último es un contemporáneo que también vive en Nueva York y con quien Loredo ha pasado de la admiración a la amistad, y hasta si se quiere a la complicidad en esa aventura del color, sin llegar al radicalismo monocromático del norteamericano. Más que la absoluta celebración de un color —que es fácil de captar enseguida en los cuadros de Marioni— en Loredo la gama siempre propone una aventura; no literaria o anecdótica, como tantas veces hizo el surrealismo; sino puramente pictórica. Si un empeño se percibe en esta pintura es el de que no llegue al espectador valiéndose de medios ajenos o subalternos a su género . No obstante, resulta placentero mirarla, por armónica, que es otra manera de decir que por bella, lo cual la hace también—en mi opinión y sin ningún desdoro— regocijadamente decorativa.

Habrá sin duda quien, por ignorar esta vida de entrega a la pintura —como también a la poesía—, querrá juzgar la obra de Miguel Loredo como una muestra de vocación tardía, cuando más bien se trata de vocación discreta que, acaso por notable modestia, ha esperado mucho en darse a conocer (o al menos en darse a conocer de la manera en que esto ocurre tradicionalmente: en el espacio de una galería). Tal vez lo explique un poco el entusiasmo juvenil que anima a este hombre de 65 años que se acerca a su obra —y a la vida— con la deslumbrada inocencia de quien espera aún realizar muchas cosas “cuando sea grande”.

 ©Echerri 2004

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