Pressemitteilung
CARLOS SABLÓN
There are artists, artworks and art creations that are not easy to write about, even for someone like me who makes a living with this. It’s like putting into words what he has done, the painted figures already do better than any thought, text, or a poem. Carlos Sablón is not only a painter, he is also an artist with an obvious talent for drawing and color, just as it is evident how his soul expresses his song through drawing and painting techniques. I am certain that his song will resonate for eternity beyond his matter as an artist and beyond mine as an art historian. Carlos Sablón not only is a painter, he also is rather a singer of what cannot be defined only in words; it is as if a God has granted a chosen few the ability to give definition to infinity of figures and images that have not suffered the deception of time and have rather been affected by the times punctuated by reason that has merged with sentiment. There are poets and poetesses who have never written poems, and if they have, they keep them secret so that no one knows and no one reads. They, instead of writing, paint, and their lyrics are stretched on canvas or become sculptural forms... It is the poetics of Masaccio, Donatello, Leonardo, Sebastiano dal Piombo, Pontormo, Bronzino that reverberates in Dali, Magritte, de Chirico, Savinio.
In Carlos Sablón, this aesthetic philosophy expands and emanates. Each of his paintings is poetry, it is narration that unfolds in the gazes, in the scenarios in skies that taste of sunset and dawn together. Each of his works reveals a timelessness as if the macrocosm were revealed in the microcosm that manifests itself in the dreamlike atmosphere.
The feminine, the faces, the subjects become symbols and beauty returns to being aphroditic and radiant, a truth emanates that uncovers a world reserved for the few, only those who let themselves be looked at by the eyes of Carlos` figures. Carlos was born in Cuba on 3 September 1981, in Cuba where everything is mystery and the joy of unravelling every mystery and finding the meaning of it, even in the incredible contradictions: poverty and joy, music and cheerfulness, rags and decadence, and the vitality of hair that is combed by the wind. Carlos Sablón was born in the land where conversation still has its value, there is no hurry, and no words get in the way. In Cuba, there is the vibrant and calm energy of the southern regions of the world. Listening counts and understanding what the verbal does not and cannot explain; rather, looks and gestures count. In these regions there is no anxiety of productivity, no nervousness of cause-and-effect, no rhythm of profit at all costs and immediate; their rhythm is that of the heart and that of the blood that makes you dance at ten o`clock in the morning, from bar to bar at all latitudes, because the bar is not just a meeting place but is the space where the group becomes a community where the individual feels belonging and therefore identity. This artist was born in the land of kindness, yes kindness is their gift and their power theirs and its free ephemeral arsenal as deadly as nuclear warheads. Women, old men, everyone looks at you and calls you “mi amigo, mi corazón, mi vida, mi amor”. Even “Hombre” assumes the most authentic meaning, closest to its etymon; you are matter and illuminated by the sun you leave your shadow because of light, remember you are made. Their speaking is true, it is not formal or with the aura of convenience typical of our world. In Cuba and with making art in Sablón, you realize that to survive day by day, you need nothing like these magnificent people who lack everything from the necessary to the essential elements. that is how you finally realize that those elements are essential, important only to us because we have made them indispensable and necessary.
At the age of nineteen, he made a profitable commitment to art studies, obtaining a Bac + five diploma in the specialization of plastic arts education, then completing a master’s degree in education. He also obtained a degree in 20th Century Art Criticism, Visual Arts Criticism in Cuba, 90/95 Plastic Arts Panorama and Visual Arts Challenges in the Territory. But his soul is that of a painter. While teaching at university and art school, he works to exhibit his works in a gallery. He began doing exhibitions that multiplied, especially abroad. In 2012, he settled in France, in Châlons-en-Champagne, a historical town about two hours from Paris. In this town, he organized an artistic creation residency and simultaneously showed in France and abroad. This artist feels she feeds her soul with Art in all its forms but keeps her Cuban roots and continues to study the culture of Cuba, which he loves and recognizes in its archetypes. His art making and aesthetic thinking is aimed at sharing his cultural roots.
The entire Caribbean archipelago has recognized his works and his artistic projects have multiplied both in his country and internationally. He has showed in an important galleries and art Biennales. He has been invited to exhibit in many fairs in the surrounding regions. He has travelled and taken part in exhibitions in Japan, Chine, Italy, Mexico, Colombia, Spain, Scotland, Germany, Austria, Poland, Czech Republic, Portugal, and England. His works are part of private collections and permanent exhibitions. He says, “Art is very important to me. It is a way of expressing oneself, in multiple forms, of sharing one`s interpretation of life. I mix styles, works by ancient and contemporary artists, drawing inspiration from literary and pictorial references. The fantastic school of Dali, for example, the mythological universe of anthropologist Carlos Castaneda and representatives of the Latin American boom”.
Carlos Sablón shows that art is in fact research that becomes modus vivendi, whose sacrifice becomes a concrete action in the etymology of this term, which can be traced back to the fusion of the adjective `sacer` with the verb `facio`, literally “to make sacred” what one does, what one accomplishes.
In him we can see the sacrifice in his commitment, in his untiring will to succeed, in his hope to look beyond all boundaries, because he who sacrifices does not get depressed or sad or give useless discontent; he who makes sacrifices rather knows how to share and understand, knowing how to perceive, therefore, a sense of sacredness from what flows from his commitment and making sure that in the times of life one can leave a mark that lasts beyond the finite time of matter, becoming infinite and immortal like any work of art. This is what I perceived at that post-inauguration dinner, and this I believe is the essence of getting to know Carlos Sablón as an artist.
John`s works clearly reveal that the artist has always been the one who gives visibility to the invisible, even to those desires to be kept hidden that make common morality blush. The artist is a kind of radio that receives from both benevolent and malevolent spirits, making himself available to inspirations that belong to the invention, the transcendent and the irrational, to all that the average person can only experience in fantasy. The ancients believed that it was the muses who inspired all artists, from poets to actors, even musicians and painters.
In the Renaissance era and up to neoclassicism, it was thought that it was not the muses, but angels or demons who came to inspire and lead the artist`s heart, mind and hand. Angels and demons, figures of gloomy light, luminous entities opposed to dark ones, with the artist choosing to serve one or the other. But in this extraordinary artist there are the fables of Cuban tradition, there is a little green frog, who wanted to be the biggest frog on earth. And then there was a white daisy who lived underground, she stayed there in her warm little house, far from what lived above the earth, but one day the sun, the rain and the wind came knocking at her door. Cuban fairy tales tell of Pilar a little girl who wore lovely pink shoes, but while playing on the beach she noticed that there was another little girl, she looked like wax and had no shoes on her feet. The story is told of little Piedad, she had received a wonderful doll made of silk and porcelain as a gift for her birthday, but she kept holding on to her old rag and cotton doll, for this one she felt love because no one loved her.
There are no princes and princesses, no witch fairies and enchanted castles, no captains, and armies, of these things we shall meet very few. In his figurative tales we will find chickens, geese, frogs, snails, foxes as protagonists, and their innocent and light-hearted magic is quite far removed from that of the fairy tales more familiar to us. In his figurative tales we find women who are ageless, men who are lost in the imaginary and ephemeral continuum of landscapes that this artist manages to make real and true.
Carlos has the rare genius of someone who can read beyond what the lines show. He has been able to combine the Caribbean tradition with the European tradition and has created fantastic worlds that emanate their ephemeral and real presence through landscapes of eternal light, auroras that mingle with sunsets, animals that with their gazes continue their story in those who linger to look at them. On the other hand, paraphrasing part of a letter that Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, we could say that the artist is such if he is able to grasp the ineffable and give form to what form and figure cannot have, a sort of creature who has received more than others the mystical spark of the creator and cannot but live badly on this earth that knows little of the heavenly place from which it came. I have hope that God has more pity for artists than for any other man, or that he considers every man an artist.
But there is another aspect of which one must be aware in order to fully understand Carlos Sablón`s art-making, a dimension that can be traced back to the term mysticism; "mystic", in English mystical, derives from the Latin myst?cus, which in turn derives from the ancient Greek mystikós (????????); this word in Greece was used to describe the celebrations that opened the mysteries of initiatory cults; in fact, mystikós (????????) means initiate.
This is another aspect that reveals the research that is clear in his drawings and paintings. Each of his works is a true journey where mystery opens in Beauty and Knowledge. For him, time does not count, what counts is rather the time and the continuous search, as if Beauty were the ultimate mystery where he himself, as an initiate, approaches without counting the days or looking at the clock.
Carlos uses his talent, the techniques he learnt in art school, his shrewd research into the great artistic movements ranging from ancient art to the Renaissance, right up to contemplating Surrealism and Metaphysics, to feel the emanation of mysticism, to feel before the work as an initiate and to approach the Infinite as Plotinus said, close to the `divine`.
Because if the etymology of mystic brings our thoughts back to the ancient initiations and to the Greek terms ‘mystikós, myst?rion, mýst?s’, it is also true that mysticism is realized with the contemplation of the divine, then I can affirm that every work of Carlos is a true gateway that requires contemplation, in the etymological sense, that is to say, by means of, ‘templum’ the space of the sky, the infinite. It is like affirming that every work composed by this extraordinary artist can be enjoyed if the observer allows himself to be looked at by the work, likewise it can be affirmed that his art making is nothing other than a passage that unites the sky, transcendence, with the earth, that is, immanence.
In some works, the reference to artists of Surrealism, such as Salvador Dali and the masters of Metaphysics, is evident. In each of his subjects there is an emanation that gives all rational discourse ephemeral, all metrics traceable to the simple empirical relationship between observer and work of art. From the classical world he took inspiration from the works of Velasquez, Bronzino, Raphael, Vermeer, and the late Spanish baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán.
This is how color and form, in his art making, merge and mingle so that the work becomes a vehicle of beliefs. He achieves a kind of `harmonic contrast`, a paradox that is indispensable to be illuminated by truth. The juxtaposition of form and color in his works is based on the relationship between drawing, chromatic matter and individual forms, symbols and signs that allow the Mystery to be revealed. There is no randomness in his art making, nor extemporaneity, and this is proved by his precious skill in graphic representation, his drawing, the feminine details, the line that defines the sensual physiognomy of a woman. Carlos Sablón has the light, enthusiastic and beautiful touch of a gesture that, in its pursuit of the feminine, evokes the magnificent enchantment of ‘Niche che si slaccia un sandalo’ attributed to Phidias. It is a beauty that surpasses that unctuous Western banality and is dressed in the eternal style that once reigned in the Peloponnese. It is an Eros that of Carlos that tastes of life, of hyperuranium, of soul, of poetry.
I also believe that two reflections are necessary: if we consider that the word Poetry has its etymology in the Latin word p??sis (in Greek ???????) derived in turn from ????? which means to produce, to make, to create and, in a broader sense, to compose; if, therefore, every artistic creation is “Poesia” that reaches its climax when it succeeds in involving the user of poetry, then, he is a poet, a true poet who elaborates, transforms and qualifies the material until the final work becomes an authentic poetic piece. It is in this way that the object becomes a demon, a bridge that allows one to reach the enchantment and perceive the feeling, the emotion.
The second reflection that is necessary to fully understand Sablón`s art making; is that for him, art is not the object, the artefact, it is not the work as such, it is certainly that too, but also the flow that is generated when looking at the finished work of art. Art, therefore, is not something that is related to the work, it is not just the work as a material object, that would be reductive and misleading, Art is rather the dialogue that is created between the object and the beholder.
In him, this flow is also generated while he is creating, researching ancient texts, drawing, shaping, coloring, it is generated when he blurs the pigments so that the light shows the volumes of the form, so that the tones merge, showing the signifiers and the meaning that will take the observer beyond the object. He creates subjects in a space that is at the same time measured and boundless, in a kind of dialogue and storytelling that are generated while one looks at the work and by the work one is made to look at it; just as when the conductor of the orchestra takes the baton in his hands, closes the score and in the mystic gulf moments of silence fall, moments before the audience expresses its participation with applause. Art is, therefore, an entity that has no physicality but is flow, it is a means, the gateway precisely that the artist crosses so that this event, this, dare I say it, `revelation` is realized. This is the second aspect necessary to enter the aesthetics of this artist.
Through his inspiration, he not only qualifies the space of the medium with skill and talent, he rather gives it a physiognomy, a face, a spatiality, an aura so that something different is created from what was there before the encounter with the artist. Every work of art is a kind of spark that transmits light, inexhaustible; the artist uses the object so that a feeling is transmitted that only belongs to him. Art is an energy that has been transmitted for millennia, forever and ever.
If Representation in its etymology is the activity and operation of giving form with figures, signs, sensible symbols, objects or various processes that are not necessarily concrete and tangible to objects or aspects of reality, abstract facts and values and what is thus represented, and if also Representation is, in its derivation, the union between figure and the prefix ‘ra-ovvero’, recognizing in the figure, the appearance, and more often, people; for example to resemble something or someone, to represent by means of an allegory or a symbol, then all this is evident in an artist like him, who expresses himself in a language that combines representation and depiction. It is for this reason that he is primarily concerned with observation and discernment of the motions of the soul. His composing has a primary purpose, which is to excite and then move. He composes his works by studying shapes, symbols and the dynamism of forms and subjects; this is his essence as an artist and as a man who tells and wants to tell a story made of images, of figures. Each of his paintings is a kind of window that can only be opened by those whose heart and eyes are still capable of receiving enchantment and wonder.
But what makes up the sense of beauty and the aesthetics of non-verbal language in Carlos`s works is his conscious - unconscious desire to rediscover the ancient sense of storytelling and ‘affabulation’. His art making is also a way to revive the sacred spark of curiosity, to reread the sources, to tell the story of the myths, of the Eros that gives harmony and meaning to Chaos. Carlos creates new fables to tell, creates lands to explore, seas to sail in which to shipwreck, without time or age. He tells and lets works become eternity and objects that can be worn. His inspiration is generated in the inexhaustible spark of making thought and emotion visible, real. A moment that extends beyond human metrics until it becomes memory before the danger of everything being lost becomes a real risk.
Curiosity, the age-old desire to know... A kind of soul switch that waits for nothing more than for the adult world to stop, notice and decide, finally, to turn on.
Once upon a time, knowledge in general, history, was passed down through the `oral tradition`: the telling of stories so that the individual and the community could know to build a memory. Stories were mainly told by elders, merchants or young travelers returning from trading trips or battles.
Their storytelling allowed knowledge of distant and mysterious places, fairy tales flourished, tales that still haunt the hinterland of the Caribbean islands, and mythologies. Fantasy and imagination ran wild, opened hearts, and decorated the cave, the walls of the house or those of the church. Historia was born.
Social observers, experts in the fields of communication, psycho-sociology, and behavior, who draw up modern trends, warn that the new generations, but not only them, show a clear need to rediscover the sense of the fable, of the tale, and to feed on the fantasy that only the magic of the tale can generate.
Storytelling, and the ‘affabulation’ that follows, enables psychological defenses to be nurtured and strengthened, and gathers around an event a group that rediscovers the true sense of listening, as distinguished from feeling. This allows people, especially young people, not to be overwhelmed by boredom and never to tire of looking for the emotional and passionate dimension in the projects they will build and the decisions they will have to make.
Unfortunately, recent history writes down that these twenty years of the new millennium do not seem to differ too much from those of the past; man does not make memory and is still particularly good at reproducing hatred, destruction, and despair. Reclaiming recounting makes it possible to recover the communication of emotions, banishing silence, the aphonia of the senses, incomprehension, loneliness, and indifference. It is in this that we learn the essence of Carlos Sablón`s artistic life. Admirable is the dialogue of gazes that he generates in his almost exclusively female subjects. There is no staticity, his brushstrokes, the color comes out of the sign and expands in the atmosphere of the pictorial space, everything becomes vibrant as if the artist, with his alchemic energy, could fix the moment in its expansion. It is the maturation of the soul-defining drawing in Leon Battista Alberti, it is the mature and bizarre inspiration of Titian Vecellio`s last works.
Sablón is one of those few and rare people who were born with the vocation of the artist, he then formed and forged his conscience so that his living and his very image as a man would be an emanation of his living of art and for art. His portraits, the subjects in which the human figure stands out, almost always female, emanate reality and while ephemeral that only Art can render instead, eternal.
He opened his world to me with each of his works because each of his paintings or sculptures is a true journey where mystery is revealed in Beauty and Knowledge. With him I have understood, and I have become certain, that time does not count, rather time counts, the continuous search as if Beauty were the ultimate mystery where I with him, as in a continuous rebirth, approach without counting the days, without looking at the clock. Every work by Carlos Sablón is a true gateway that requires contemplation, which in its etymology is with ‘templum’ the space of the sky, the Infinite, Eternity.
There are artists, works and art making about which it is not easy to write even for someone like me who does this for a living. It is like putting into words what, in fact, the painted figures already do better than any written thought, any text or poem, so I have written with caution and care, with care I have tried to mirror myself in his works and to send back, as best I could, the reflections.
Alberto D’Atanasio
R.O. M.I.U.R. lecturer in History of Art, formerly in charge
for the Aesthetics of Visual Languages, Theory of Perception
and Psychology of Form
