Darker Visions: Recent Paintings by Luis Cruz Azaceta

Edward J. Sullivan

Since the late 1970s the paintings and drawings of Luis Cruz Azaceta have been taking the moral and ethical pulse of this country. In usually large-format works, executed with highly expressive (and often very bright) colors, Cruz Azaceta has dealt with themes of urban violence, the type of personal isolation that comes with living in a large and overcrowded city, the hellish conditions created by mismanaged government, the abuses and oppression of dictatorships and, in a number of highly affecting works done in the late 1980s, the ravages of AIDS. Cruz Azaceta has tended to work in series, creating progressions of images which deal with a unified theme and are painted and drawn in a coherent fashion. In the early 80s many of his images called to mind the boldness and ‘in your face’ immediacy of cartoon or even graffiti art. Later, he appropriated the use of the grid as a formal basis to create his statements of social protest and sardonic commentary. The grid-like forms served to remind us of his thorough grounding in the techniques of classical modernism, with their suggestions of the visual strategies of such artists as Piet Mondrian, Joaquín Torres-García or the Cubists.

In the current exhibitions of Cruz Azaceta’s work, he has abandoned, or dramatically altered, many of the modes and practices of earlier times, reinventing for himself a visual language that is no less strident and powerful, but lending it a subtlety that may surprise or even shock many who had thought they understood the essential elements of his art. The images now on view represent a purification, an essential stripping down of many of the admittedly baroque aspects of the artist’s earlier production. The vibrant colors and directness of his statements have undergone a radical transformation. One of the most dramatic shifts has taken place in the area of color. The day-glow brightness of Cruz Azaceta’s best known images has been replaced by a meditative and sometimes even melancholic insistence upon monochromatic tones. He has all but banished the pulsating reds and the vivid oranges (his favorite color). We have to look very closely at many of these works to see the tiny spots of color that he has added at the last minute in a remote corner of the canvas (so as to remind us that, in essence, he is still the same artist we knew before).

In these new paintings we observe a greater maturity; they can be read as products of a seasoned artist who has had time to ponder in greater depth the serious viewpoints and the thought-provoking dilemmas of human existence. As Cruz Azaceta says in the interview published herein, he has in this new series dealt with more universal statements rather than individual conundra.

The principle themes and figures in many of these paintings relate to man and woman. Here, as is so often the case, Cruz Azaceta includes a self-portrait as "Everyman." In other works, his characteristic profile is incorporated with that of his wife, the artist Sharon Jacques. No specific narrative content is implied, however. He simply works with the human figures closest at hand to evoke a wide ranging spectrum of emotion and commentary. One of the most satisfying canvases in this exhibition which includes the double portrait of husband and wife is the splendidly painted Displaced. This work, a diptych, began its ‘life’ as a single canvas on what is now the left hand of the picture. After painting the work, the artist observed it carefully for a long time, finally deciding that to isolate the two figures at the extreme left hand of the painting’s surface would lend it a strengthening note of estrangement and disaffection, creating of it a commentary on the often precarious nature of all human relationships. From a formal point of view, a detail such as the masterly painting of the individual bricks in the wall in this picture serves as a testimony to the fully grounded, mature nature of Cruz Azaceta’s most recent production.

In his latest work, Cruz Azaceta has also branched out into new realms of materials. Wood, nails, metal building studs, applied Polaroid photographs all form a part of the wider repertory of substances with which he works. He is also much more interested now than ever before in revealing the process of his art. The figures are created in charcoal, the backgrounds are painted in gesso and a layer of shellac is applied to the entire image. Every stage of creation of the work is observable in one way or another. Thus in this new chapter in Cruz Azaceta’s artistic career, the way the work of art is made shares equal importance with its message. The importance of art manufacture and the significance of the object itself as a transmitter of ideas become inextricably woven together.

Several of the paintings in this current exhibition continue the thematic concerns of Cruz Azaceta’s past. The boat image has been for many years a key element in his personal iconography. Although the artist likes to recast and reinvent his ideas and concerns in the various series he has made, some of the forms and basic elements inevitably remain. The boat reveals a preoccupation with the journey of life as much as a symbol of personal migration and exile. The artist shares this iconographic form with many of the younger artists of Cuba. Cruz Azaceta has stated his sense of connectedness with the members of the younger generation of Cubans. He insists that despite his training and artistic formation in New York that he is still very much a Cuban artist in exile.

New York, 1998