Four artists in chiaroscuro - Matta, Anronio Segui, Wifredo Lam, Jose Gamarra

UNESCO Courier, July, 1984 by Edouard Glissant

MATTA is an artist who escapes the controversy between abstract and figurative art, slipping out of the debating chamber and dissolving like a wraith in the bluish haze with which so many of his greatest works are suffused. And if what he paints has not the immediacy of the real, neither is it a sketchplan or a diagram of something that exists. I would go so far as to say that Matta is forever painting the pulsation of life.

Depth in Matta's painting is achieved by a projecion forward in front of the canvas of pictural space, a proscenium which saw his first attmpts to render visible the convulsion of modern thought: the disintegration of old systems of logic, the vertiginous flights of Eros, resistance against tyrannies, the unshackling of the "Savage Mind."

Is it possible to "paint", not states of mind, but the very functioning of the mind or, going still further, that fabulous gamble the "complete man", reconciled with all forms of humanity, finding in them his own being and fulfilment?

Matta's painting shows us that it can be done. What we find in them is the movement that fuels our most personal upsoarings and consolidates the roots we share most widely with others. Planes that combine or resist each other on the canvas, spirals of discovery, explosions of revealed incompatibilities, condensation into new stars of our most intense convictions--here matter joins company with and follows the dynamism of the spirit. Matta does not paint "things", he illuminates trajectories.

This is an aritst who forever seeks to find out and demonstrate "how things work". Not merely, like an architect reflecting on his work, how it is constructed, but how it really functions. Can we, for example, gauge or even begin to comprehend the vast ferment of cultures reacting and interacting with each other today" We have no guide or blueprint to judge by; but does this mean that we should renounce all attemps to read the Book of Destiny? Matta's paintings raise questions such as these and show us that there is no halting the spectacle of life.

This is thoroughly modern painting, aloof form conventional quarrels, investigative, always in movement; we know that it has its origins in the ancient wisdom of the Andes, but already it is exploring unknown regions that humanity is projecting on the forefront of the proscenium stage of history.

SEGUI

THE art of Antonio Segui has affinities with the art of prose, the obstinacy and ruggedness of which Segui adopts to probe reality and bring out its raw qualities.

It has often been said that colonial Baroque resulted from a superabundance of being. The artist took pleasure, a mischievous pleasure perhaps, in showing that he was capable of rendering to excess what he was expected to express: catholicity, civilization, flamboyant rhetoric.

In the case of Segui, we are without any doubt in the presence of another kind of Baroque, which does not strive towards the overelaboration of being but tracks it down behind its masquerades and gesticulations. The aim is to discover our true nature, or what is left of it, perhaps, when it is divested of the shabby finery imposed upon it. paradoxically, it is the shabby finery that Segui shows us, so that we can guess at what is hidden beneath.

In all the different stages of Segui's painting, stages which follow each other with mounting speed, we find the forms of this Baroque, constantly renewed. Rickety towns, overrun towns, prostrte passers-by, leering catastrophes, smashed dolls, clothes for scarecrows, but also the emotion diffused by the light of a streetlamp, the warm colour of a single tree, the word of a rainbow, the sun of a man's step. In other words, the everyday, which pares away our pretensions or alienations and reassures or consoles us at the same time.

The unexpected thing is thus that in Segui's work the obstinacy and ruggedness are full of an unfailing charm. This prose is also poetry which navigates in the depths. Segui paints that which perverts our nature and makes us strangers to our truth, but also everything that carries us away, secretly nourished by an inner sum, in the tango of tenderness.

LAM

THE art of Wifredo Lam involves a double objective: to seek out and bring into relief the forms secreted by a very concrete reality, that of his native island, and at the same time to draw attention to the cultural predicament in which we find ourselves today and which demands a contribution from each one of us.

Lam's first concern was to fill the canvas; its poetry lies not in the tree but in the profusion of vegetation, verticals surging from the memory, exploding into an island-space-filling jungle. African forms are revived, not through cliche-clouded eyes, but in all their vital inner mobility--triangles wide-eyed with astonishment forming lozenge-shaped bucklers, burgeoning ears of moon-horned gram; and those anatomical anthologies--obduracy of feet round which the soil seems to lap like water, the Sumerian slant of the torso inclined towards a divinity to impart a secret.