Roberto Fernández Castro

LA PAZ PERDIDA

Armando Zesatti: the nature of color and the lived experience of the dream.

I would like there to be stable, motionless, intangible places, untouched and almost untouchable, immutable, rooted; places that would be references, points of departure, beginnings…
-Georges Perec, Species of Spaces, 2001

To say what Armando Zesatti truly paints, one would have to admit that it is, quite simply, light: that fascinating phenomenon which drives some to express themselves and to show nature as though it were reality itself, while teaching others of us to look—without excuses—at what is most excellent and most sublime, at the pleasant and beautiful harmony of life. We can speak of mastery in the handling of color, but only if that allows us to say in a simple way what has been painted in a profound way. And to achieve this, Zesatti’s pictorial art teaches us not to settle for a frivolous gaze; it hands us a travel ticket across an unknown land of paths and abysses, a land we seem only able to reach by crossing marine waters whose violence remains imprinted like a map of scars on walls of giants. Yet it is an uninhabited world; minimal. There is sky, sea, air, paths, rivers, trees, and horizons in it, but little or nothing that reminds us of human strivings.

Light and shadow, sky and earth, presence and absence. We are so prone to ordering what is undecipherable into asymmetric opposing concepts, because it is a way of synthesizing—and of avoiding—the sentimental wounds we hide by calling them sentimentality or kitsch; as when dreams and ruminations lead us along the paths of the infinite and the ungraspable, and then we call it metaphysical. But if at least we are willing to accept the rules of this game, the dilemma between the art of the real or the figurative and the art of the ideal or the abstract may not be resolved, yet it will become clear to us that all true art is conceptual art. And once the ending is known, we can return to a historical beginning that will no longer seem like an unnecessary introduction, but rather a living understanding of the visible.

At least since the seventeenth century it has been possible to speak of realism, but it is a kind of instruction that includes creations contemporary to us, and that despite chronological and historical distances—or insurmountable differences in lived experience—are always echoes, reiterations, survivals that, appealing to a profound conceptual support and to mastery in the use of certain technical resources, assume a commitment to the immediate: the luminous phenomenon, the perception of a surface, the materiality of an object, and so on. That is why it has been said that realism is an art of crisis: when everything great and heroic is so far from us that it feels alien, we return to looking at the world in its authentic immediacy, in the simplest things we have at hand, in what remains for us to contemplate our guilty cosmic solitude.

Whereas the hyperrealism of the 1960s was born in the United States with the aim of exhibiting the loneliness of the great cities—within an opulent consumer society surrounded by shop windows, glass, chromed and enamelled automobiles and motorcycles, fast food and technological appliances—the Spanish realism of the 1970s presented the features of a peripheral, marginal, and impoverished society, above all ideologically impoverished, after surviving a civil war by clinging to its centuries-old rural component. And yet, this other realism preserved countless surrealist adhesions or elements of magical realism that allowed painters such as Antonio López, Amalia Avia, or Isabel Quintanilla on the one hand, and Eduardo Naranjo or Carmen Laffón on the other, to introduce conditioning questions—elements or figures that implant disturbing modifications into the perceptual literalness of our everyday naturalistic attitude, as could also be the most scientific mathematical perspective; inconceivable within our true life-world.

In this sense, it was not only of Eduardo Naranjo that it was said he painted time; time has been one of the themes that has provoked the most commentary throughout realist painting. First, because of the passage of time that painting itself bears witness to; then, because of the sequential character or narrative time we are accustomed to seeking in paintings: we try to find out what they are telling us, how much time they contain, or at least what time of day is in them—dawn, midday, or dusk. And lastly, the time we most forget: the time of the artist and the time of the art object itself, which are one, insofar as the time of making, the support, the pictorial layer, and the technique tell us how they have co-lived and aged together. That is why we must never overlook the material immediacy of the object, because the one who delivers it to us is our alter ego, another self who—just as we see it—has not chosen this or that technique arbitrarily or out of convenience, but because it was the path most appropriate for him to allow us to recover our deep intimacy, leading us along that long journey toward the horizon of distance.

We must not forget this when we return to look at Zesatti’s painting, for this is how we approach what seems to be his genre: landscape. But landscape, as an independent genre, emerged from the sixteenth century onward, and what distinguishes contemporary realist landscape within it is the composition of a multitude of essential elements that seeks to capture even the most insignificant details precisely as the most significant ones. Hence, in the rigorous, almost scientific presentation of natural landscape or urban landscape, the technical skill of the realist painter consists in a constant desire to transgress the two-dimensionality of the pictorial surface, until the optical illusion—beyond the seduction of deception—envelops the viewer in the unease of the true.

And with Armando Zesatti’s painting, alongside realism, we also find the possibility of rediscovering naturalism, which, speaking of older traditions, was one of the aesthetic branches of realism that also began in the seventeenth century and consolidated in the nineteenth century as one of the most important artistic movements of modern attitude and contemporary art. Although this art concentrated mostly on the development of still life and on the illusionistic game of trompe-l’oeil, it constituted in itself a challenge to the gaze, to the sensations generated by what the eye captures, as if it could reach the margin of sensations generated as well by touch, taste, smell, and hearing. The naturalism of the last century, by contrast, appears more humble and at the same time more ambitious. Rather than confusing or deceiving, it aspires to give an account of what is observed and felt in a direct and simple way: the naked truth that resides in the transcendence of the everyday.

The passage from the naturalism expressed in still life to the open-air naturalism in full sunlight that we encounter in Armando Zesatti’s work preserves a fundamental characteristic of still life: it excludes the human figure from the start in order to speak of the human being with the human being. The obliqueness in Zesatti’s exploration of the human consists in eliminating every vestige, every trace of human passage through the world—not only as if it were a virgin paradise still preserved from our presence, nor as a landscape now abandoned but once inhabited, but as a world that is motionless, silent, and timeless precisely because it records in no way the existence of the human.

I confess that this was the first thing—and the thing that most caught my attention—in Zesatti’s work. I was very surprised to read that Marta Zamora asserted that all his painting reflects an optimistic approach to life. To me it seems that hope is possible in his paintings, but not optimism, because if this work points to the exact moment when painting becomes critical and faces a crisis produced by the destruction of the natural world, then it demands that we fight for the conservation and balance of that surrounding world we call environment, ecosystem, life.

I think this way when I see Land of Giants (2010) or Stone Wall (2010). The human absence prevents us from even measuring the time and space of the mass that rises before our eyes. We can venture its monumental character, but its coldness and desolation do not allow us to be sure whether it is a landscape as unexplored as it is ancient; whether the painter’s presence has managed even to touch its virginity; or whether it is, rather, a futuristic vision. And the same happens with Cathedrals Beach (2015). Is the horizon line where a traveler has vanished from sight—someone who finally left? Is it the instant just before witnessing the arrival of the human person who will return life to the beach? Or is it, quite simply, the image of how the world is, how it would be, or how it will be without us?

If this seems monstrous and preferably false to an optimist looking at Road to the Sky (2005), Footprints (2011), or The Pillars (2012), I would say they rather corroborate the hypothesis—or at least make the questions still more unsettling. Who marked those lines in the ground that, when they tell us they lead to the sky, bring to mind immense rice terraces, offerings, fertility gods, symbols in remote times? For the footprints come and go; they seem more the product of getting lost than of a made and reliable path. And the immense bases of those pillars—why is the question not even “who built them?” but “who abandoned them?” They are true ruins; what shines is their crumbling. It seems the painter has wanted to preserve them on canvas just before their disappearance.

All of this appears like a divine punishment, an apocalyptic image that shakes us. But Zesatti’s work of deconstruction does not end there. If the human species is condemned to disappear, it could well be that plants and animals recover lost peace and once again reign upon the Earth. But… where are the animals? How is it that an observer so meticulous and an artist so rigorous as Zesatti has registered neither with camera nor brush the fauna of a paradise? While the Brueghels—the great family of Flemish painters—delighted in painting garlands of flowers and paradises inhabited at once by all the animals that science and imagination knew, the Mexican painter has found not a single fish in his seas or ponds, no amphibian in his puddles, no insect in his plants, no reptile on his rocks; not a single bird in his trees or skies. It is true that we can see Texas Saddle (1999), Shells (1999), and Seal Cradle (2015), but the first seems to have remained there for a long time on a fence also half in ruins, with grass grown and an empty horizon; of the shells only a pile of husks remains, only the mollusk’s armor; and of the seal cradle we see only the rock bathed by seawater. As in Duck Nest (2012) and Heron Nest (2008), it seems the place has preserved of the animal only the name—or its trace.

This holds for open landscapes such as Overlook (2002) and Southern Border (2009), but also for those details that, like trompe-l’oeil, make us doubt what we are seeing: complex compositions of millimetric precision that, by overflowing the canvas entirely, bring Zesatti’s painting into proximity with at least two basic branches of abstract painting: expressionist painting and concrete painting. In the first sense stand above all Abyss (2012), High Tide (2014), and I believe to a good extent also Sand Road (2017). If one thinks about it, one will see how works like Zesatti’s can also be pedagogical; they allow us to understand how Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko arrived at their painting. Or to realize how abstraction does occur in our minds, yet it comes from the surrounding world in a concrete way.

And I now say “in a concrete way” because I have also spoken of concrete painting. Let us look at Sunset (2005) and the more recent Palm Concert (2018). Nature repeats its forms to infinity with mathematical precision. Here painting has been purified in terms of form, color, and movement in the same way that expressionist painting purified perception and sensation. Yet both currents touch in Zesatti’s work; between both extremes we find Pyrotechnics (2004), Sparkler Lights (2014), and Micropyrotechnics (2016). Perhaps works of a nature as informal as Pollock or Clyfford Still, whose lyricism is not alien to the impulses of Latin American concrete abstractionism—Emilio Pettoruti, Cícero Dias, or Samson Flexor.

Little by little we find the concepts that characterize Zesatti’s painting, and it is not that realism and hyperrealism dissolve; rather they acquire their true face. We begin to discover the secrets of an art and a way of looking that convinces us not by reproducing photographically what the artist saw, but because it allows us to notice how we have ceased to look at the world. In this regard, I want to rescue one of the groups that most impacted me upon encountering Zesatti’s work: those paintings whose subject is trees. At first it seems romantic, but note that I have not said the peace and tranquility of the forest, nor have I said the greenness of the trees, nor even the beauty or vigor of strong and leafy trees. None of that—save the ominous atmosphere of Blue Autumn (2001)—for Zesatti has almost always chosen images like those in Patient Waiting (2013), Camouflage (2014), and It’s Getting Late (2015): images of silence and solitude.

On one hand, they are explained by the long seasons the painter has spent in Europe—winters, no doubt. But on the other, it is a body of work that by itself would justify Zesatti’s painting in its originality and clear awareness of the viewpoint in which he wishes to place us. There is, of course, a contrast with the liveliness and lushness of jungle or tropical vegetation in Among Your Leaves (2016) or Pines and Pinecones (2017), but in every case the artist has looked only upward. To the treetops, one might say of the second group; yet the force and predominance of the first makes us say it is the trunks and the bare branches that have called his attention. Once again, it is the almost white lines of the branches (birches, no doubt) that draw their strokes across the blue surface of the sky. And again I think of Pollock. And yet something intrigues me even more: where do all these trees begin? What is their height? Where is the ground on which they stand, the earth that feeds them? There is uprooting: the artist does not make us look at the ground, nor at the tree in its entirety, only its tips, its branches, its limits—up there where it rises to make us look at the blue of the sky, even if it is another desolate and silent sky.

Perhaps for this same reason the enormous triptych Corner of the Southeast (2008) is so marvelous. There, we are not only in the shade of the populated trees; above all we stand before the immense spectacle of mangroves sinking their countless roots into the swamp water, which—unsatisfied with the number of arms that pierce it—offers them to us duplicated in their reflection. If it were only about reflections, one would say we stand before a passionate admirer of Monet; if it were only about one of the columns of trunks whose strength and brightness are as unreal as they are inspiring, I would say it is a reactivation of Magritte’s La Folie Almayer; if it were only about the immense jungle surrounded by the serenity of its waters, I would say there is here a follower of Tomás Sánchez. But the truth is: everything is there. In the way it unfolds in its full extension, it seems that at last we find a synthesis of our whole world: of what we see, what we dream, what we long for, and what we have lived. “Woe to the one who does not carry on his back what has been / his errors, his fear, / and speak with them as with a lover,” wrote the Catalan poet José Luis Giménez-Frontín in one of his most sincere poems.

But I have begun to speak of the marvelous. Will I end up saying that Armando Zesatti is also a Latin American surrealist whom we can associate with the baroque and with the marvelous real? In a certain sense, yes. But to prove it I will repeat: he is a conceptual artist—for those who prefer contemporary and postwar art. I have always been troubled when certain visual artists, especially painters, title their works Untitled. They do not think of those who will rack their brains cataloguing them, nor of those who will sell them and be forced to describe and reinvent them for every new client, and much less of those who will want to show them to friends as a precious possession that nevertheless has no name. Fortunately this is not Zesatti’s case: each of his works has a title, a name that tells us much about him, about what we are seeing, and about us as we see something clear and without evasions, like Coconuts and Palm (2000), Reefs (2012), or Stones and Grasses (2011). But it also suggests seeing beyond, as in Open Wings (2004), Cathedrals (2011), and Bed of Goblins (2014). And if those are merely visual suggestions, Between Life and Death (2003), Abstract Encounter (2006), or Corner of Dreams (2004) project us fully into a part of ourselves we would prefer to deny or conceal. So that no one dares to undertake the journey, we would rather say there is no such interior within us—though Zesatti has painted a clear path toward that interior, a path and an interior that do not seem entirely hostile in the end.

In these different levels at which Armando Zesatti thinks and names what he paints, the intimate unity of his paintings has led us into a world of concepts where we find abysses, sunsets, roads, Cold Currents (2014), concerts, encounters, entwined bodies, lights, doors, corners, Tied Lives (2006)—in short, everything that Armando Zesatti, patiently, as if waiting for us, allows us to look at again, or to look at for the first time if we are new to the craft of contemplation; but very Little by Little (2017), without ceasing to count on that small breath of aesthetic enjoyment.

Only one more thing remains. Perhaps I have not said that Zesatti paints light and color. Yes—there they are to prove it: From Orange to Green (2001), A Touch of Pink in a Green Dream (2003), Forest Green (2012), Navy Blue (2012), Lavender (2017), and above all Lagoon of Seven Colors (2009), in my opinion one of his best works. Even if he does not like to present himself as a landscape painter, this piece undoubtedly brings most strongly to mind the painting of José María Velasco. Zesatti also has, by the way, The Sleeping Woman and the Awake Popocatépetl (2008), an aerial perspective like those of Dr. Atl and Raymundo Martínez; but Lagoon of Seven Colors (2009) is certainly comparable to Corner of the Southeast (2008) and synthesizes everything I have been saying. In it, it becomes clear that Zesatti’s themes or motifs are there only to return us to the world. Stones, water, and plants are what lies on the surface, and they are as important as skin; but beneath them are the nerve endings that conduct us to our dreams and lived experiences, as we abstract ourselves in order to look at what is simplest and what is most complex, what is most plain and what is most profound: form, line, surface, color, sensations, feelings.