For Abisay Puentes (1974), the face is a mark, and this mark is the trace left by time and space on the soul of man. The face inherently reveals two ways of being, hence the masks in Greek portraiture (tragedy and comedy), but here, the painter, driven by his biblical calling, unveils the Apocalyptic mystery concealed in the countenance of historical man. Revelation and consolation, hope and distress. The history of the soul reflected in the face. In Greek statuary, the heads lacked pupils, the eyeball was like a small, round, blind world, devoid of a sense of time. In Abisay's work, eyes are like tunnels devouring hours, concealing messages and warnings from another realm. Faces elongate or round off depending on the desolation or hope residing in their inner times. The cavernous grimace, the silent laughter, psychic elements of existential unease, heads bowed in supplication, heads imploring, livid and perplexed by the ultimate revolution. The tension that life of sin brings, and the tranquil joy of those possessing temperance and love. The painter's work oscillates between two tensions. Desolation pulls at faces that tend to vanish as if by a magical shrinking skin. Hope restores their weightless roundness. The passion of fear, the passion of waiting. All his drawings are inhabited by the message of the Book of Revelation of Saint John. Through the tension in the expressions, the call for conversion begins; through the astonishment in the visages, the warning concludes with an ultimatum. This psychological perspective in religious art is neither pessimistic nor optimistic but is deeply rooted in Christian realism, a sign of eschatological hope. The painter embraces the Apocalyptic ambiance to illustrate what is said in Revelation 7:9, “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.” We are before a new way of allegorizing visions, considering the engravings of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) on the same subject. Puentes' art is unsettling, it does not allow beauty to rest, because what his genius demands from form, it does not quench. In his strokes, unexpected expressions stand out, the rigid shift of man's and the world's ultimate fate. In Greek art, proportion condenses, rhythm wisely limits. Abisay Puentes overflows in proportions, in the strangeness of being before prophecies. Greek forms are devoid of time and astonishment. Abisay captures space and ushers it into eschatological temporality with the prophet's astonishment. He separates faces from visages to unfold the traces of time on the soul of the heads. Through the intricacies of his pen work flows the biblical time to which his brush adapts like mesh to the body. “Figures in continuous undulation as on Velázquez's surfaces” (according to Camón Aznar), grazed by the passage of shadows seeking light as in Rembrandt's canvases. His standard is not a landscape or a portrait, but the cosmos and the nature of the penultimate hour and ultimate life. His budding perfection lies in his allegorical possibilities enriched by the transcendence of themes in souls seeking the meaning and purpose of existence, following the path, life, and truth that is Christ and His word.
“And the kings of the earth, and the great ones, and the rich, and the military leaders, and the powerful, and every slave and free person, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, and they said to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?’” (Revelation 6:15-17)
One paints due to an emotional need for self-affirmation and psychological transfer of states of soul and mood, which lead consciousness or the subconscious to objectify in a specific form and matter the personality, temperament, and character. Painting, poetry, and music-making serve to transfer, displace, and condense the moral and emotional states of the personality; in the case at hand, that of these painters, into a plastic, visual form on the canvas's material and color, transmuting the intimate world of temperament and character into allegorical themes with more or less definable meanings and styles. And there are many ways (styles) to do it, and modes (aesthetics) to feel it. The guiding faculty is intuition coupled with ingenuity, because ingenuity and talent will be seen later. Every young painter is a "germinating mustard seed" a possibility, hence a bit of "anonymous fame" they already possess, and due to the unpredictability of their well-known trajectory, hence the term "Impossible Painters". On the other hand, one does not like what one does not understand, does not understand what one does not feel, and what one does not feel, one can neither like nor understand. Feeling a plastic work is not to reason about it, not to pin a label on it like a butterfly in a museum display. Feeling an oil painting, a drawing, is to intuit with imagination to what extent it fulfills the triad of Good, Beautiful, and True. The painter's eye is like a magnet that attracts fragments of other realities and models to magnetize their own work and give it apparent or real unity. For the younger, the beginners, it's a search and re-search of epochs and archetypes, making criticism in this regard futile; the style and the impossibility of predicting it legitimizes the measure of truth, goodness, and beauty that the painter manages to poetize so far. Hasty criticism distorts the truth of the painting; harsh opinions mar the budding beauty, rejection stymies the goodness, the initial naivety of the vocation. The misunderstanding of "learned ignorance" and the insensitivity of commercial blindness compensate themselves by labeling and pricing. One can only reach the truth of the painting by immersing oneself in the life of the form, thus the painter will make it beautiful and good, and all of this will be seized by the one who touches their own "substantial being," not with a merely reproductive mental effort of models, but with a very personal, subtle, and indefinable gift, which is that virtue that gives the power, the ability to symbolize by transfiguring the model or prototypes with which every painter, poet, or musician begins to practice, to get motivated; then one can dive into the life of the form and achieve that truth, goodness, and beauty of the work and for this, paradoxically, one must discover "the form" in the life of one's own vocation; then it will be the artist who dictates to the critic their great definition and to the merchant the imponderable price of their work.
The Evolution of Faces and Visages.
(2001)
The series that "professionalized" this young painter was his exhibition "The Apocalypse of Abisay," which had successive stagings, all receiving a sensitive "spiritual and material" reception. Now we are before another presence, that of "Faces in Captivity." It began with the leitmotif of apocalyptic faces, the stripping away of faces in judgment, now evolving towards meditative faces and torsos with contemplative hands. A Gothic framing of the apocalyptic gesture? To speak of this painter, a poem would be better. As I have said, art that is good, beautiful, and true rejects labels, expels by itself the mark of the "book of hours" of fame. Among the "impossible painters," he has been the most noteworthy, maintaining from his apocalyptic beginnings a clear route of expression that is easily demonstrable. In this exhibition, there are no longer "bodies swirling, dislocated faces," as we expressed that time; now, the faces relax, elongate, soothe their features seeking tranquility in a curious muteness, where hands seem like wings paralyzed in a meditative search for dark dovecotes. The figures, fitted as if in a niche, peer out swathed, to the Gothic? The hands assume a paralyzed gesture, and the fingers resemble undulating seaweed submerged in the sea. He defines them as "souls in captivity." Are these the souls from his initial "Apocalypse" that have returned "to the life that saves"? The tranquility of these faces lends itself to controversy. Sadness, bitterness, weariness, monastic torpor? An intricate halo surrounds each visage, captivity of another life? In art, "reincarnation" is possible. And this series is a testament to that. Abisay has "reincarnated" those faces and bodily clumps into an intermediate state between anguish and tranquility. A return to life in the niches of this earth? Each painting in this series is like a drowsy cocoon into which the old faces from "The Apocalypse of Abisay" have re-immersed themselves. What does each cocoon enclose? Each of these oils is like a chrysalis that, between caterpillar and butterfly, makes one feel the "Nymph," beautiful, good, and true of his youthful art. This new series is akin to that "Nymph," a promising "intermediate state" between the first exhibition that professionalized him and the imponderable future of his fame among the impossible-to-predict painters.
Theology and Painting of Abisay Puentes What theological function can art have? Can art serve theology as reason serves according to Saint Thomas Aquinas? The painter's plan is to establish, with his work, premises for art to become a tool for theological teaching and, in turn, a servant of the project for a "School of Reformed Religious Painters." This exhibition is the prologue to this project. The layman, the uninitiated, the non-believer will have many questions about it, perhaps driven by curiosity to learn and seek information, or else be captivated by these conceptual mysteries of high poetic and pictorial value; the believer, the connoisseur will immediately intuit the secrets and purposes of this young artist. Since his most significant exhibition, where we stated that he "professionalized," Abisay has shown us his personal stamp, that theme today we see consummated in this one, the faces are no longer those symbolic masks of the Apocalypse of times and return us their faces with the life they had, each with the passion that afflicted it; if the gesture of the former was apocalyptic, painful, these let us feel the eschatological implication that preceded them. As I said in the prologue, on the occasion of that exhibition, which led to a book: "His allegories condense a style of the soul, he does not draw the sinful, reprehensible act, but penetrates the essence of its consequences and makes them felt to the eyes"... Metaphysical art? Perhaps, but not incomprehensible at first glance. If we consider the abstract and whimsical themes of other painters, Abisay's work concretes rather than dilutes a testimony of his own worldview of the universe, faithful to the faith of his ancestors and to the eternal paradigm that, for a work to aspire to perfection, it must be: "Good, beautiful, and true." This exhibition is the culmination of that other one that took place at "La Madriguera" (gallery of the Assoc. Hnos. Saíz) called "The Evolution of Faces and Visages." We witness the consummation of that one, and as we also put in writing that time: "Among the 'impossible painters,' he has been the most notable, maintaining from his apocalyptic beginnings a clear route of expression easily demonstrable"... This time the faces are not of the resurrected, but of souls whose bodies have not yet died, or rather, those same souls returned, by a leap in time, to the existence that lost them, entrenched in a limiting situation of life that loses, sin, certain sins evoked here, grafted into a context of biblical revelations susceptible to being allegorized in plastic images as testimony, and if desired, with an evangelizing intention. In tight synthesis, we expose the meaning of this exhibition and at the same time the artist's intentions to establish with this and the previous show a "school of reformed religious painters" and painters with a vocation for it. Foundations for a "school" of reformed religious painters: The title may provoke controversies or fleeting paradoxes, but it is nothing new to talk about the aesthetics of the art of the Protestant Reformation or the Catholic Counter-Reformation. What concerns us here in our environment, identity, and idiosyncrasy, and the artist who has laid the cornerstone for this school. Thus, we will succinctly outline the style principles that make it up and its plan of objectifications, as well as its aesthetic sense based on the philosophy of the painter Abisay Puentes.
Dr. Juan Enrique Guerrero Álvarez
Poet, Historian
Cultural Dissemination Center of Conferences
U.N.H.I.C
It is a tremendous pleasure for me to create my art, and I embrace all those who own my art as part of my family. You can reach out to me whenever you wish, I will be there for you.
Contact me by email: info@abisayart.com
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