Dra. Teresa del Conde

Zesatti. Ilusionismo y realidad. 2001

Armando Zesatti describes himself as a self-taught painter. This is true to a certain extent, considering that although he did not attend formal art academies or follow a structured academic curriculum, he did benefit from training—primarily technical—provided by various masters. To this has been added an unwavering tenacity, resulting in an impeccable command of the craft he practices. In his own words, he has sought to understand painting “as a way of life,” to which he devotes his full efforts. His work is deeply connected to the very essence of the painter’s craft as it should ideally be mastered: the ability to create a reality where previously there was nothing but a blank canvas. It is also closely related to photographic framing, since, like other contemporary artists such as Richard Estes, Rafael Cauduro, or José Castro Leñero, he has made use of photography to construct his compositions—much as artists of the past did. Vermeer of Delft, Canaletto, and Guardi, for instance, employed the tools available to them in their respective periods: the camera obscura.

The body of paintings presented here is unified by a clear underlying thread: tropical or semi-tropical vegetation. In earlier phases, the artist explored desert landscapes, achieving highly subtle combinations. Now, the exaltation of verdure becomes the central theme—par excellence—of what he proposes.

“Green calms me greatly… Not all of life is beautiful, but painting greens is therapeutic… When the sky is gray, I paint, but it takes me longer… I could not paint depressing subjects.”

On one occasion, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903)—whose journals are far less well known than Van Gogh’s letters—confessed the following: “Wherever I go, I need a certain period of incubation that allows me to learn, each time anew, the essence of plants and trees of every kind. In short, they do not yield themselves easily to understanding…” His attitude was “natural” in a painter who loved nature. Gauguin fled to the South Seas for reasons more sensorial and sensual than idealistic; he was ambitious in his use of color, drawn to “luxuriance, to sunlit joy,” as Herbert Read records in the passages he dedicates to him in The Meaning of Art.

Gauguin bears no stylistic relationship to the young painter who is the subject of this text. In fact, it is not even certain whether he has taken note of Gauguin’s work or assimilated the particular emphasis the French painter placed on symbolization—whether in Pont-Aven or in Tahiti—through stylization. Nevertheless, despite the distance that separates them, they share a curious bond. I would define it as an appetite for chlorophyll (from the Greek khlōrós, meaning green; and let us recall that plants are green because of light, which is essential for the production of chlorophyll).

For physicochemical reasons, the deep, intense green of landscapes is characteristic of places that are both sunny and humid. All the paintings illustrated here share this condition. It is enough to mention the predominantly green works, such as Trópico tríptico, Entre luces verdes, or La palma.

This does not mean that green, a composite color, is the pigment that prevails by its own right—later I will explain why this is so. Nevertheless, it is what we see in these paintings, since the most persistent chromatic surfaces in these landscapes (or fragments of landscape) correspond to that color. I insist, however, that the painter has had to introduce many other pigments, and I am not referring here to the yellow of the palm trees or the blue of the sky.

I have already suggested that green is not a primary color. But one might ask at this point: how is it that in these paintings it does seem to function as one? The answer may be this: because we do not perceive it in its material sense—as a mixture of blue and yellow. Instead, we see it as I now see the greenery of the ivy climbing the neighboring wall, a tone different from that of the ferns overflowing from a pot directly exposed to the light. Such greens are not perceived by the eye as intermediate steps between blue and yellow. The sensation is simply “green”: one darker green against another that roughly corresponds to the color of English grass. I am speaking of sensations, and without light there would be no contrast between these different tones of green.

“A color shines in its surroundings” (Eine Farbe ‘leuchtet’ in einer Umgebung), wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his remarks on color. This is precisely what happens along edges, or with several of the agave leaves visible in the landscape Cielo y tierra, or in the most illuminated areas of the coconuts in the painting of the same name.

What, then, is happening in these paintings? They are like windows: some areas shine more than others, because only through the use of light and shadow can one achieve a sense of volume, depth, foreground and background planes, or immediacy (Fantasía verde is a good example of the latter)—effects that the painter has deliberately chosen as his modes of representation.

Although Armando Zesatti has practiced trampantojo—that is, trompe-l’œil with all its implications—in previous works, these paintings do not strictly adhere to that condition. By this I mean that they do not operate in the same way as, for example, certain paintings by Cornelius Gijsbrechts, the artist who worked at the Danish court during the seventeenth century. He deliberately sought to deceive the eye, even anticipating centuries ahead of his time by representing the reverse side of a painting—the stretcher, complete with its catalog number—which, when placed against a wall, tempted the viewer to turn it around to see which painting it was. Whoever attempted this would find exactly the same thing: the real stretcher itself.

Illusionistic games such as these exist throughout the history of art, but it was the Dutch who pushed the skill of deceiving the eye the furthest—although they were preceded by the artist who designed the inlaid wood panels of the studiolo of the Duke of Montefeltro in Urbino at the end of the fifteenth century (traditionally attributed to Botticelli, though there is no firm evidence). What can we deduce from all this? That illusion, in true trompe-l’œil, could have taken another dimension had Zesatti conceived a simulated window to which the canvas appeared to be attached. He did not do so, and I believe he acted sensibly by firmly delimiting his canvases, presenting them as what they are: paintings, complete with frames. The only trampantojo present in this publication is the photograph of the painter himself. Its author captured him posing with his back turned to one of his paintings. The viewer might assume the photograph corresponds to the actual site where that palm tree once stood, but this is not the case. Thus, photography—an art as autonomous as any other—also allows itself such freedoms.

Earlier I mentioned that this painter employs many colors in order to achieve the predominance of green, and I would like to briefly explain why this must be so. For the greenery of reeds and water lilies (or chichicaxtle, as we may prefer to call them) to appear so vibrant in the painting titled Espejo en verde, he has had to use a great deal of yellow, a significant amount of white, as well as ochres and siennas, in order to make the green areas stand out. But that is not all. Ultramarine and dark carmine are present in the areas devoid of light—in the recesses. And for the play of reflections in the lower section, he needed to finely modulate colors such as cerulean blue, browns, and earth tones; otherwise, the presence of water would not have been convincingly rendered.

Let me point to another example: in Abanicos verdes, the color, although sun-drenched in the sense that we “perceive” the light striking these spiked leaves almost from above, has required a palette likely composed of considerable amounts of blue, because the matte quality of the plants and their texture demand it.

Armando Zesatti seeks to convey the impression of realities he has seen and lived. Not necessarily in Mexico, his country of origin—although there as well. Several of these paintings were produced in Miami, others in Veracruz (the coconuts in particular), while the mangrove derives from a botanical garden crossed by a small stream. His attitude is one of reverence toward what he observes and experiences, wherever that may be. In a certain sense, he is an ecological painter, even if this was not a consciously formulated intention.

Armando Zesatti was born on April 8, 1967, in Mexico City. He was initially tempted to study design, but following family expectations, he chose to pursue a degree in business administration—something which, according to the artist and neologist Felipe Ehrenberg, all painters who wish to live from their art should undertake, at least for a time, provided they have made their practice a lifelong profession and commitment. Zesatti lived for an extended period in Vancouver, where he refined his artistic proposal. He later returned to Mexico and traveled through several states of the Republic, including Michoacán and Guanajuato.

His training in business administration has served him in what is most essential to him: the management of his time. He organizes it in such a way that he can devote ten hours a day or more to painting. This alone speaks of his absolute vocation. This young painter has already achieved significant recognition among collectors from different parts of the world.