On the 120th anniversary of the birth of painter Carlos Enriquez

August 4, 2020

The warm transparencies achieved by Carlos Enríquez, the artist who knew how to macerate the secret of tropical light and awakened, for his vital expression, the Cuban landscape, –moving away from the commercialized image of the royal palm–; his portraits, of very personal stamp; his sensitivity as an artist and man of his time (Zulueta, Las Villas, 1900-La Habana, 1957), poured into the search for the national, and accompanied by the anguish and difficulties grown in those times, which left their mark on him..., would have completed this August 3rd, 120 years.

Seen today from our perspective, and understood in its full interrelation with the reality of which it was a product, the plastic work of Carlos Enríquez is one of the most representative of the national condition of his time. The events and characters included have much to do with this, the expression of values and symbologies, due to processes of ethnological syncretism, the assumption of legends and traditions, the display of fantasy, and, above all, that singular objectification of popular consciousness leading to the progressive channel of social dialectics.

Many legends were woven around the artist, but his traces, embodied in painting and literature, are, no doubt about it, patrimony of Cuban reality. Because the work of Carlos Enríquez constitutes a treasure overflowing with Cubanness. The painter and novelist, author of capital works of painting, such as El rapto de las mulatas and Dos Ríos, and of narratives, as suggestive as Tilín García and La vuelta de Chencho, "the most Cuban of all painters," as Félix Pita Rodríguez called him, was trained professionally in Europe and the United States, and was a prominent member of the group of Cuban painters who around 1925 broke with everything academic.

"I believe that my work –wrote on one occasion the creator to the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alfred H. Barr– is found in a constant evolutionary plane toward the interpretation of images produced between wakefulness and sleep… this does not mean that it is surrealist, although I accept the mechanical freedom of creation. I am interested in interpolating the Cuban sense of environment, but moving away from the method of European schools". The search for everything eminently Cuban appears in the artistic work of Carlos Enríquez, given through the vindication of values inherited from popular culture, and from the experience gathered from reality, which he confronted with extraordinary violence, with intense light, its color and customs.

Regarding the Cubanness of the artist (much has been said over time, attributing it to perceptual questions (handling of the so-called "local color," the daring varnish transparencies that trap the solar "mirages" of the tropics), restricting it to anthropological causes –his voluptuous mulatas–, reducing it only to what is epidermical and variable in it (myths, caudillos, "machismo-femininity" antinomies, animal-woman symbiosis, portraits of his contemporaries, images of denunciation...), "without noticing that what is essential in him lies –as the painter and critic Manuel López Oliva has pointed out– in how he captured, interpreted and ordered in individual expressive system the most dramatic, underdeveloped, contradictory, autochthonous and masked aspect of the real scenario where he lived and fantasized. In reality, what integrates the essential nucleus of Carlos Enríquez's style is his capacity to transform into concrete visual emission his subjective assessment of what was seen, felt, desired and hyperbolized with certain regularity".