Dr. Lily Kassner

Zesatti: Poesía Muda. 2003

For both the creation and the contemplation of art, prior knowledge—inasfar as possible—of the process by which it is produced is a fundamental requirement.

Based on the body of work presented in this solo exhibition, our approach to the art of Armando Zesatti—painter of powerful rural imagery, born in Mexico City and situated within the current of Hyperrealism—begins with the antecedents of the pictorial tendency in which he manifests his undeniable talent.

Considered a reaction of the figurative tradition against non-objectual, conceptual, abstract, Dadaist, and related approaches, Hyperrealism—originally known as Sharp Focus Realism—is situated within the so-called “Second Avant-Gardes” of the last century, emerging in the late 1960s in the United States. Its principal platform of dissemination was Documenta in Kassel in 1972. It is characterized by translating or interpreting reality in a more verisimilar, faithful, literal, and photographic manner, through traditional painterly technique, rendering a segment of the real world.

Like other contemporary hyperrealists, Zesatti begins the elaboration of his works through the photographic capture of the subject. This is an ancient procedure in painting, employed by artists such as Guardi, Vermeer of Delft, and Canaletto, who used the camera obscura for the same purpose—an antecedent of the photographic camera.

However, this process does not consist of a mere mechanical reproduction of reality. From the very outset—through the initial choice of space and the required framing—the painter’s creative sensibility intervenes; that is, his own point of view determines that a bounded area will later become the pictorial field, from which viewers, in turn, will contemplate the painted zone in the finished work.

The Neoclassicists—from the Italian masters of the sixteenth century to the writings of Abbé Batteux in Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe (1747)—departed from the same premise: art need not reproduce nature in a general or indiscriminate way; it should depict only la belle nature, naturally according to the artist’s own criteria of beauty.

Art, then, is not merely imitation, but the discovery of reality. The artist is a discoverer of the forms of nature, just as the scientist is a discoverer of natural facts or laws. This has been the mission of the great artists of all times, and this has been the special gift of the visual arts.

Leonardo da Vinci spoke of the purpose of sculpture and painting in terms of saper vedere—knowing how to see. According to him, painters and sculptors are the great masters of the visible world, because the perception of the pure forms of things is by no means an instinctive gift, nor a natural endowment common to all.

According to Albrecht Dürer, the true gift of the artist consists in “extracting” beauty from nature: “For truly, art lies hidden within nature, and whoever can extract it, possesses it.”

Our aesthetic perception encompasses a far greater variety and belongs to a far more complex order than ordinary perception. Aesthetic experience is incomparably richer, pregnant with infinite possibilities. In Zesatti’s paintings, these possibilities present themselves, surface, and are actualized: they come to light and assume a defined and definitive form.

His art reminds us that beauty is not a property or quality inherent in things themselves, but exists solely in the spirit of the one who contemplates them.

The organic beauty of plants is not, of course, the same as what we feel when contemplating his works; as viewers, we are fully aware of this. We now see those philodendron leaves and their climbing stems; those golden fish in the pond seen through water that diffuses their silhouettes, with the eyes of the artist who has seen them. For his vision is not what we would call purely objective; rather, form and color have been apprehended according to his individual temperament, which he shares with the viewer at the moment of encounter with the work. We are no longer in the immediate reality of things; we have entered the realm of living forms, of spatial rhythm, of harmony and contrast in pigments, of the balance between light and shadow.

Zesatti does not merely portray or copy with astonishing fidelity a landscape, rocks, mangrove roots, or the leaves of a banana grove; he also offers us his individual physiognomy in an unrepeatable instant that, as Gorostiza writes, “flares up to incandescence.”

In Sueño místico, for example, Zesatti teaches us to truly see the flexible and ethereal character of the tropical shrub known as lion’s tail (cola de león). In doing so, he enriches our experience of it; after seeing it painted by him, we enjoy its beauty with greater depth.

Aristotle had already described this pleasure in his Poetics, although more as a theoretical than a specifically aesthetic experience: “Learning something is the greatest pleasure, not only for the philosopher but for others as well, however small their capacity; the reason for our delight in seeing a painting is that at the same time one is learning, grasping the meaning of things.” Zesatti, like every artist worthy of the name, cannot paint anything without infusing it with his own inner life.

William Wordsworth described this gift—this peculiar power—in The Prelude, from which we quote the following fragment:

To every natural form, rocks, fruits, or flowers,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life; I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.

Sallustius said that the world is a symbolic object. Recuerdos is the title of one of the works in this exhibition, in which a venerable trunk furrowed by thick, twisted vegetal columns contrasts with the fragility of slender branches bearing lanceolate leaves, whose remarkable variety of green tones—accompanied by yellows and blues, interwoven and luminous—stands out against a greenish-black background. This fragment of nature, through the artist’s gift, has become a symbolic image that does not elude the love of memory.

With subject matter similar to his most recent solo exhibition, El trópico y su barroca feracidad, and without a marked transition in his development—save for the refinement and growing mastery of his resources—Zesatti now presents an attenuation in the vividness of his pigments, which are less strident and more subdued.

Another novelty: due to his recent stay in Xalapa, he incorporates the exquisite evanescence of enveloping mist, granting a magical, dreamlike atmosphere to his most recent paintings. This calls to mind a verse by José Lezama Lima: “The mist of light cat-like footsteps finally comes to rest in order to be defined.”

In the capital of Veracruz he produced several works, among them Sueños compartidos and Un sueño místico, whose notable qualities distinguish them from the rest. They originated in settings within the botanical garden of that humid city. The garden is the realm in which nature appears subdued, ordered, selected, enclosed. For this reason it constitutes a symbol of consciousness, in contrast to the unconscious—the jungle and its intricate excess. Like an island before the ocean, it is also a feminine attribute by virtue of its character as an enclosure.

The works mentioned convey warmth as an expression of feeling and emotion, of elegance and restraint. They are also a conjunction of extremes: exuberant yet discreet places; ponds of apparent serenity that reveal what has been left unsaid, and—more fascinating still—what is neither evident nor tangible: the ineffable. Not in vain did Simonides say that painting is silent poetry, and poetry a painting that speaks.