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Rafael Soriano
- by Ricardo Pau-Llosa, from the solo exhibition catalogue, Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, September 1995.
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- For eyes tormented by what often passes for art in our times -
- conceptual art without concepts, "installations" with the intellectual complexity of editorial cartoons, mindless elegies for robbed tribalism - the paintings of Rafael Soriano might seem daring. And they are. Soriano's paintings draw in traditions in western visual thinking and metaphysics which span several centuries, reminding us that Latin America, despite its diverse legacies, is western. Soriano had produced a body of work without which the history of painting in Cuba, the Caribbean and Latin America cannot be told. And of course, one could not omit Soriano from the history of art in South Florida, the bihemispheric culture of this realm. He is the first great painter to develop his mature style entirely within Miami's invisible walls.
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- While Soriano's style is easily recognizable, the diversity of his imagery - and, paradoxically, its conciseness as well - is dazzling. The human figure, landscape, ectoplasm, nebulae, veils - all these function more as echoes than as clear referents or targets of allusions. The central theme of these brilliantly executed paintings is transformation. This places Soriano in the intellectual tradition of such stylistically different Cuban artists as Wilfredo Lam and Carlos Enriquez. For Soriano, transformation is not merely magical, as in Lam - women turning into horse, tree, bird, demon. And Soriano took Enriquez's fascination with the light of the tropics well beyond the latter's trite representations of translucency. Transformation in Soriano takes place between the fundamentals of seeing and thinking - between volume and distance, light and darkness. The "thematic" echoes of earth, cell, flesh, and star are the nearly effaced "words" of a visual utterance that aims to articulate how we apprehend time.
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- The sumptuous beauty of his images notwithstanding, Soriano tears apart our conceptions of an object. A thing, in Soriano's paintings, is no longer defined by contour, casts no shadow, eclipses nothing behind it. Contour, orientation, direction are all placed in abeyance, but not so we can ogle paint drippings, color fields, or textual screams. Placing the basic, familiar attributes of things to one side, Soriano discovers the essence of object - life. Presence. However, what defines presence is no longer shape. What, then, defines object in experience, memory, or both? Soriano's paintings answer repeatedly: The presence of things is defined by their function in our apprehension of time. Soriano's paintings plunge us into the core of consciousness, make us reflect on how we reflect.
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Discreet objects impact our apprehension of time because we think in terms of linear-sequenced events "inhabited", as it were, by discreet objects. Soriano's art asks how this "inhabiting" alters the way we understand time. Cubist's sliced the representation of an object into facets, but the result turned out to be less a revelation of temporal awareness (the alleged looking at an object from all directions at once) than a way of bracketing the third dimension and bringing forth "modern" bidimensionality in painting. The slicing led way from the link between object and time and toward the physical immediacy of the pictorial plane because in cubism contour was not bracketed. Every slice, every angle was a shot of the object's contours. If anything, cubism emphasized the contour of an object as its identifying essence. Time had to wait for the happy intersection of light and objectivity, placed squarely within the context of the act of the mind - conscious and otherwise.
Surrealism opened new vistas, and once the dream snapshot phase of the movement (Dalí, Magritte) gave way to the "abstract" phase the possibilities of the intersection of light and objectivity came nearer. That intersection began to materialize in the paintings of the Chilean Roberto Matta, one of the seminal painters of Latin and North American art in our times. But Matta got caught up in the psyche's volcanos, creating grandiose depictions of the unconscious as energy pools, Wagner cum magma. In Lam's painting light, signaling possession and transformation, is subordinated to the line. Peruvian Fernando de Szyzlo advanced the role of light into history and existential ethics melding pre-Hispanic Andean with luminism.
But the most accomplished and refined oneiric luminist would be Soriano. He let light, object, distance, desire the locus of the subject, volume and darkness all come together simultaneously, equally, and in terms of each other. Object, grasped essentially (free of "contour") but grounded in presence, revealed inner landscapes. The object, as it turned out, was the matrix of memory, and within it all the landscapes surface, light and its denials. Not object as thing but object as context for presence. By radicalizing the present, presence lets us grasp time. Soriano registers this knowledge by depicting the mutual invasion of light and object in ways that have nothing to do with the way light behaves in the shared world of experience. Light's way is the poet's who makes essential worlds from the bare, vivid components of cluttered familiarity.
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