Mario Carreño (1913-1999)

oil on canvas

Acquired from the artist by the present owner (1963)

The canvas is unlined and well stretched. There is craquelure throughout the work especially along the upper edge. There is a 1 in. scuff with a few surrounding spots of paint loss in the center left in the red area. There are three small black stains in the red area on the right. There are two small stains in the center red area. Under ultraviolet light there is no evidence of inpainting. Overall in stable condition.
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Towards the end of his life, Carreño recounted the critical period during the early 1950s through the mid-1960s when towards the end of a nearly decade long sojourn in New York he progressively abandoned figuration in order to explore the formal and emotive possibilities of abstraction. The artist describes the impetus for this change as follows, "around 1950 Action Painting emerged. Pollock paved the way with his 'drip' paintings [and] abstraction dominated with such figures as Mondrian, Albers and Moholy-Nagy—something quite different from what I had left behind just two years earlier. Naturally, my work began to change as well towards forms that were more simplified, my humble 'guajiros' gave way to this geometric tendency in art. Everything was moving towards the square. It was a complete turning point. All previously held concepts were dismantled opening the way for Geometric Abstraction. My own painting became increasingly more abstract, however I wanted to give it a Caribbean quality, to express via rhomboids and rectangles the transparency and colors of our land. But the results were different and instead the compositions began to take on a more 'universal' sensibility."¹

 

Indeed, while Carreño returned to Cuba in 1951 (eventually settling in 1957 in Chile where he would live for the remainder of his life), the artistic milieu of New York City during the immediate post-War years had an enormous impact on his artistic production as his highly exuberant and baroque figurative compositions of the late 1930s and early 1940s, influenced, in part, by aspects of such early 20^th-century vanguard practices as Cubism and Futurism, gave way to a more restrained and structured aesthetic. Nevertheless, the artist approached this stylistic change in a manner not unlike his previous work—transforming the language of modernism within a regional context in order to assert a distinctly Caribbean or Cuban voice vis à vis the Parisian or newly baptized New York School. And, while admittedly the results ultimately took him in a direction which affirmed the "universalizing" effects of abstraction, Carreño's attempt to tackle this issue in his work is very much akin to the explorations of other important 20^th century artists from Latin America, most notably Joaquín Torres-García and Rufino Tamayo.

 

Executed in 1961, Untitled (Geometric Composition) reflects Carreño's geometric period at is peak. Color and form are intrinsically interwoven and arranged across the pictorial surface in a harmonious play between overlapping horizontal and vertical expanses. Red, orange, and black rhomboids, rectangles, and squares set against a white surface emerge and recede in a dynamic and pulsating composition that rewards the viewer upon each new glance or prolonged observation. The results are not unlike the Kinetic or Op Art creations of such luminaries as Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, Julio Le Parc and Victor Vasarely, artists whose work Carreño knew well from his travels and some of which he later exhibited with at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris in the 1962 exhibition L'art Latino-Americain à Paris.

 

By the mid-1960s, Carreño's forays into geometric abstraction were over. He turned his energies to a new series of works that marked his return to figuration, a language he felt more aptly enabled him to express his concerns about current world events and the threat of nuclear war. Nevertheless, the lessons of abstraction continued to be felt in his work in the ensuing decades and no doubt this period of genuine experimentation further solidified Carreño's ongoing interest in the marriage between form and content.

 

 

1 As quoted in Orlando Castellanos, "Mario Carreño: Pintura y vida," Unión Revista de Literatura y Arte, Vol. 7, No. 18 (January - March 1995), p. 95