GAZING THROUGH THE SCREEN

   There are places where one’s mind can see the entire world, real places where the landscape vibrates with the inhabitants’ consciousness and is completed with each breath. Such a space resonates with a distant echo of a time that has ultimate purpose and no place to be but where it is. Such a place is revealed in the landscapes of Humberto Guanipa.  Not ordinary academic paintings of trees, houses, and the sky, he takes the viewer on a journey to shadows. Ghosts of a kind that find refuge in every man’s heart hunting spectres of the joy, as well as, the pain of man’s existence. Remembrances of youth and the experience of adulthood hover over these places where we have all lived. Using the flatness of the picture plane, Guanipa produces modern visions in these strongly colored paintings. Beginning with paint on the stretched canvas, he covers these first impulses with metal screening. Using the resulting atmospheric image, he places flat shape representing mountains, trees, water, and rocks. The paint is applied, scraped and applied again in a search for a ‘‘skin’’ for the painting with all of the blemishes that time places on creation. This process flows back and forth in a titanic struggle and Guanipa’s heroic images of the world survive. Mr. Guanipa’s work has the same brush work found in the early American modernist paintings of John Marin. The patterning of the surface and the shallowness of the space produced is a continuation of the tradition heralded by the eminent critic of the 50’s New York School, Clement Greenberg. The surfaces are layers, an invitation through which to travel. During this journey edges appear and disappear, paint transforms the viewer into the caretaker of the spaces that result. The informal character of the image promotes uneasiness within the dynamic color. The added depth of the screening produces a barrier to finding the truth inherent in the land. Like someone who prospects for gold, searches for artifacts, or digs to plant new life, the artist has created a path or rather a doorway to a journey for himself and the viewer. This is a difficult sojourn and the artist is seemingly telling us that only the most honest will reach the end. Beyond the formal considerations of the painting is the music and mysticism of the vision. Guanipa is ultimately a visual poet who transcends the picture and orchestrates a complete performance, a Symphony of color and shape that allows the viewer to participate in it by bringing their experiences into these Homeric spaces.  

Fredrick Duignan- Curator of Contemporary Art