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Manuel Quintana Castillo
ArtNexus No. 47 - Jan 2003
|  | | The retrospective show La piel del tiempo. Time’s Skin. Manuel Quintana Castillo), presented by Galería de Arte Nacional, brings together 96 works done between 1948 and 2002. The show marks the different stages making up the artist’s proposal, whose work comes from geometric abstraction and social realism, trends that framed Vene–zuela’s artistic panorama during the 1950s. But Quintana Castillo breaks away from it by creating a language of atypical figurations alluding to an imagery of ancestral reminiscences. Cloud Weaver, 1956 is an example of this first period, where the synthesis of the figure, degradation of color, and the symbiosis between figure and background achieve an unreal and mysterious space that the painter will explore in later creations. In accordance with the informalist searches during the 1950s, Quintana abandons figuration to venture into the free handling of compositional resources. But in the 1960s, he returns to figuration, subordinating the figure to a sectioned plane activated by elements incorporated in the painting to produce beautiful visual contrasts, as it can be seen in Doll Store, 1967. At the end of this decade, a brief incursion into color will help the artist discover those pictorial resonances that he will integrate masterfully in later compositions where color, atomized by fragmented brushstrokes, builds a space saturated with vibrant chromatic atmospheres. Without abandoning plane structuration, which had been heralding itself since his initial works, the artist begins to purify his language and uses abstract shapes inspired by Cubism. In the 1970s, the geometric search settles into freer compositions. Given their telluric character, these paintings inscribe themselves into the concept of sensitive geometry as an expression that’s essentially Latin American, as it can be seen in works such as Icon II, 1978, and Ulysses, 1979. In his production during the 1980s, both the freedom of the brushstroke and the composition’s rigor acquire a supremacy that seems to transcend the painting’s limits. In works such as Presence, 1988, the rational and the emotive create atmospheres which drift in a sort of geometric expressionism that the artist has called “living geometry.” The investigations the artist did within this trend during the early 1990s, take him into topological geometry, a discipline with applications seeking to provide models or structures to unstable spaces… “The result,” adds Ernesto J. Guevara, the show’s curator, “is a proposal in which signs, calligraphies, and lines pay heed to a notion of space understood as continuation, where randomness and rationality of geometric structures are able to coexist. This can be appreciated in One, from 1992; its surface is a conglomerate of strokes, lines, and forms showing the difficult balance between rationality and subjectivity, between gesture and shape. Working in that direction, the artist gradually gives priority to the graphic symbol, the stain, the contrast. The format’s initial arrangement in horizontal and vertical planes takes second place to the contrast of opposing tones, conferring the work a sense of displacement. Thus appears the Heraclitus’s River proposal, which tries to show the continuous change represented by the flow of river waters, as noted by the Greek philosopher. Topological Painting with Fingerprint, 2000, is one of the most recent works in which the artist summarizes the preoccupations that give his works direction. In this stage, this creator brings together what’s dispersed, joins what’s opposing, and like in a mosaic he totalizes what’s fragmented, building a space and a time showing the tracks of life’s brief but unstoppable flow. Tracks that Manuel Quintana Castillo knew how to register during 54 years of fruitful artistic labor. |  |
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