JORGE RESTREPO

In the luminous boundaries of the invisible

“The light is the first thing visible on the path towards the invisible”

José Lezama Lima (free interpretation)

By Donaldo Altamirano

I have taken on the challenge of this presentation, assimilating it to certain surreptitious arts, to the translations that arise from silence to silence, to the alchemy and to the changing of veiled or elusive meanings. Appealing to what Octavio Paz calls “the privileges of sight” in its original purity?in other words, slightly diminishing the immediate aid of habitual logic?I shall, instead, affirm the essential primacy of intuition. Therefore, I apologize beforehand if at certain times my words assume the suggestive mechanisms of poetic expression rather than the procedures of self-evident demonstration, if they adopt certain unforeseen biases of the metaphor in the eagerness to insinuate at least as much as would have been given by our own imagination if we were relaxing alone in the luminous chasms of silence.

I would like to propose just a few stimulating guidelines for reading, sketch some general points of perspective, stir up some provocations, provoke intersubjective temptations so that we all let loose our own flight of fancy (when and toward where we most feel like it), our own yearning for meeting up face to face with the unexpected and the unknown.

Upon considering this display of the current phase of Jorge Restrepo’s work, our first forewarning is directed at setting aside the prejudices of a coldly Newtonian or mechanically Cartesian interpretation. Just the opposite; we consider that there is a fervent warmth of friendliness that vibrates with a flame of cordiality, breathing spirit into these complex compositions; that a kind gesture invites us persuasively to penetrate the colored warp of these canvases. But before we do that, we must necessarily renounce our prerogative to any hasty opinions. It is always advisable to suspend our judgment beforehand. It is necessary to soak up the silence of these paintings without haste, as when a healthy body undresses and stretches out under the open sky to receive the rays of sunlight, without pretensions of an immediate translation to musical notes, to figures or to discourses.

A second precaution counsels us to note that the color in these paintings is alive, that it throbs with autonomous and self-contained pulsation, that it flows or rests, nourished with profuse organic saps that sprout like a spring of vital substances that bind together the fugitive definitions of the form with the epiphanic manias of the light. There is an elusive presence, abstractly organic and vital that trembles among the geometric delirium of the shapes, amid the pulsating weft, where some reflections of firelight magnetize and seduce our gaze. We alert you that from the core of the constructivist frenzy of those rectangles brought together in throngs, a spectrum of light is born, breathes, grows and is multiplied. Universal, ubiquitous and all-embracing light, which similar to our memory (as Jorge Luis Borges would say), men cannot contemplate without feeling vertigo.

I would like to call attention to the nonaccidental presence of metallic colors. Gold, silver, mercury, tin and other metals are interwoven in this tempestuous concert of other geological, plant or aquatic colors. At given moments of great intensity, a splendor of prehistoric coppers throbs out from the canvas, bursting into a fanfare of archaic bronzes.  These are the ancient metals?shiny blood red, laboriously freed from their rust, polished by a centenary labor of forges, damascening, burnishing and embossing. There is a patient goldsmith, there is an artisan hammerer of bronzes who pulses his ancestral scales from the recondite makings of the painter Restrepo. In the subconscious interlinings of the contemporary painter, of the informed and contemporary artist, the transmigratory concerns of a legendary artisan pulsate, just as Stephen Daedalus (i.e., James Joyce) once said of himself.

In this set of paintings, we find both adventure and resignation, both daring and nonconformism, reserve, restraint and austerity. One of the manifest, evident, obvious renunciations is translated into a detachment from the morphological intrigues of traditional drawing. Restrepo draws the wrong way, in the wrong direction, by discovery and by surprise, turning his back on his personal aims of adventure and exploration. We could say that the artist plunges into a process during which light and color draw themselves, motu proprio. This is done in such a way that behind the complex warps where the reproductive fever of color battles a duel with the irrepressible filtrations of light, some diffuse, embrionary shapes?always incipient, always in bud?gestate, simply aspiring to arouse slightly, to touch the integrating mechanisms of our figurative perception gently.

Two basic movements complement each other in the methodology of this Colombian painter. One of them is analytical: The strategy of composition proceeds frequently with resources analogous to those of pointillism: Seen from close up, the large shapes break down into a multitude of brief rectangular strokes that appear to affirm an atomistic parabola or sustain a corpuscular theory of the displacement of light. The second procedure is synthetic and requires the spectator’s active participation, which is evidenced by contemplating these works from a distance. In that case, the corpuscles, the monads, the atomic particles are clustered together, complement each other, combine, fuse, integrating in organic suggestions, in rhythmic progressions, in tonal scales, in nourishing swarms, in thick foliage, in banded aerial currents, in compact terrestrial droves or aquatic schools.

Through the cracks where the light filters, through the fissures themselves where the light ascends toward the vertices of abstraction, some irrepressible suggestions of landscape seep through, some pulsating plant sap drips vast displays of a biological architecture are woven, some reflections of aquatic depth flow and reflow, or burst in oceanic expansion, the apotheosis of clouds at sunset. In short, a vast scale of analogies open up spaces of progression to the infinite.  At this point it is opportune to give a third and final warning:  not to stick to interpretative determinisms in order to avoid falling into the temptation of absolute definitions. Always bearing in mind the definitive lesson of dialectics given to us by G.W.F. Hegel in his “Phenomenology of the Spirit,” true reality cannot be reduced to its final outcomes: Reality is, from the beginning to the end, the entire overall process of its own gestation.

(Tegucigalpa, Monday 12 April 2004)

Translated by Gertrude Brekelbaum, PhD

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