Santiago Espinosa De Los Monteros. 2012

La realidad extrema de Armando Zesatti. 2012

To confront nature is to revere it. If there is one theme that occupies a position of prominence in global discourses about the permanence of life on this planet, it undoubtedly resides in the green section of our collective imagination as a species. Although nature in reality encompasses far more tones than just green, this color is unquestionably the protagonist in humanity’s survival manuals.

To face nature directly is an act of safeguarding our most primordial modes of survival. Within that survival lies not only what we can now grasp with our eyes, but also everything that in some way signifies us and gives meaning to our presence in this world.

Armando Zesatti has focused his interest on nature’s original forms. By observing with such care how plants have developed, he accentuates colors, shadows, and superimpositions, rescues tonalities, and creates environments—one might almost say even temperatures—of everything he observes and now delivers to us as if it were a warning call about what we are on the verge of losing.

If it is true that the long path taken by realist painting over centuries has yielded varied results, it is equally true that in every era pictorial works emerge that are temporally close to what is being observed. Today, a body of work like that of the formidable Cornelis Gysbrechts—the Flemish painter who lived in the second half of the seventeenth century and made what Gironella called trampantojo (trompe-l’oeil) his principal device—would no longer make sense.

At that time, when still lifes, portraits of those close to the crown, battle scenes, and courtly representations prevailed, a work whose only ambition was to modestly imitate everyday objects—so convincingly that they could be confused with the real thing—was little more than a wink, perhaps no more than a diversion. Yet, in retrospect, we now recognize it as a crucial antecedent of an expressive current that remains active to this day.

If those early approaches did not travel far conceptually, they did so technically, using the limited resources available at the time. Today it is clear that reconstructing reality on canvas is not enough, nor is virtuosity alone sufficient. It is necessary to deploy tools that allow one to steal a fragment of the living world and recreate it in another living world, albeit with different planes and intentions.

Such was the technical endeavor undertaken by Albertus Seba a few years after Cornelis Gysbrechts produced his illusionistic paintings. Seba spent many years of his life collecting thousands of rare specimens gifted to him by nature—insects, birds, serpents, stones, and, of course, plants. Each item that entered his collection was meticulously copied by two skilled employees: Enricus Füllmaurer and Albertus Beyer. Their names tell us little today. What speaks to us instead is the monumental enterprise of producing, one by one, precise paintings and drawings filled with detail of everything that entered Seba’s ambitious collection.

If we wished merely to indulge in what can deceive the eye, it would be easy to turn to photography—something Zesatti himself often does—to place ourselves before another fragment of the world that we have appropriated and which, technically rendered, returns to us the image of what we chose to immortalize.

Perhaps this explains why, in the 1960s in the United States, this new pictorial approach to the environment took hold with such intensity. As in the seventeenth century, emphasis was placed on the everyday: candy shops, streets, cars, corners of vernacular architecture were painted. The difference is that what was observed fifty years ago rescues an immediate past that is now longed for and has generated a cult of what was recently lost. What was recorded four centuries earlier reconstructed only a few interior spaces that today merely document the intimacy of a curious painter.

It would seem that American painters such as Richard Estes, Terry Rogers, and Chuck Close sensed that everything was changing more rapidly than a consumer society could register. There was an awareness of the need to record shared spaces, to exalt the heavy, gleaming stainless-steel doors of telephone booths, to imitate the photographic precision of a face—or the body of Kate Moss—or simply to painstakingly account for how this type of work is produced, including the bacchanals and unrestrained orgies that scandalize conservative spirits.

Within this same vein, though in more subdued settings, the eroticism of Colombian artist Darío Morales is noteworthy. The formal restraint of his nudes undoubtedly established an aesthetic later followed by many. The Chilean Claudio Bravo, though more measured in attitude, also reaches moments of great tension when reproducing frontal bodies that often gaze directly at the viewer.

In Mexico there are splendid representatives of this current. Víctor Rodríguez, among the most prominent, pushes the perfection of each brushstroke and its relationship with reality and evocation to the limit. Situations of great visual power flood his canvases with impeccable technique. For many years he portrayed his wife, who served as the model for one of the key stages of this New York–based painter’s career.

Although still at an early stage in their careers, two highly notable creators based in Querétaro—Rafael Rodríguez and Luis Sánchez—have developed astonishing bodies of work that reconstruct in detail the people who form their intimate surroundings. Faces of friends, absurd yet plausible situations, and a refined expressive language compel the viewer to look carefully at the promising work of these two young artists.

Undoubtedly one of the most powerful visual antecedents in Armando Zesatti’s work is the Cuban painter Tomás Sánchez, who, by omitting a close, reconstructive view of landscape—his work often contains somewhat idyllic compositional evocations—approaches nature more directly through a precise visual reconstruction of figurative reality.

Unlike many artists who develop what I would call “extreme reality” work, far removed from strident expressionism and extreme situations, Armando Zesatti has followed other paths. Without revealing outright, he suggests. In doing so, he shares with us everything that underlies a first glance. Verde Bosque, for example, is perhaps one of the most contemplative recent works in his production. Two trees emerging from a medium-height forest are the discreet protagonists of a silent, restful scene.

Between them and the viewer stand other, lower trees. We are close, yet distant from the tallest ones. Standing out in the landscape, they retain something sovereign, as if admiring their dominions. This unusual piece, in which we see more than a mere detail of a larger landscape, conceals one of this painter’s best-kept secrets: the ability to convey temperature, time of day, and the ambient sound of what we are seeing.

The same occurs in the mysterious painting Sueños compartidos, where plants appear in the foreground, reaching our gaze without interference from mist or vapor. Behind them, at a short distance and with a timid reflection in the water, an estuary whose course remains unseen unfolds enigmatically, promising a long, labyrinthine journey.

Water is undoubtedly one of Zesatti’s great protagonists. In other periods he has turned his gaze to the sea, freezing its incessant movement and selecting at random the precise wave that, after millions of years, finally slides onto land. Olas reveals the seconds following the break of a larger wave. Battling the undertow, another wave advances, foaming; beneath it, the water rushes swiftly back to the sea. It must arrive, despite everything, on solid ground, fulfill its task, its destiny, its design.

The foam crashing against the rocks is now there forever. From this moment on, and for our gaze, millions of suggested bubbles will never burst nor release their air to reveal the sea beneath them, as if they now jealously guarded it for eternity.

Zesatti’s distant gaze, though less frequent than the one that carefully approaches every detail, gives us works such as Lloviendo en las barrancas, where the perspective of a landscape urges us to search for traces of the human: a campfire, a road for cars that might have sullied the purity of nature, some construction. Nothing. Here there is no human presence nor its calamities—except for the one who looks, the one who paints, and now the one who observes what another has seen.

This absence of human beings makes us the sole guests of honor at the feast before us. Only we are there to watch the heavy downpour advance over the hills or to witness the careful circumstances born from the first drops falling onto still water, momentarily distorting river stones. Ya está empezando a llover.

This cautious and precise approach to reality becomes more powerful insofar as it selects only detailed fragments of open spaces. These details compel us to reconstruct—and thus participate in the pictorial process—the spaces surrounding what we see. We complete a palm tree of which we have seen only a branch of coconuts; we wander blindly through El charco, unable to escape it, traversing it entirely from this initial encounter; we remain silent before Misterios, waiting for the vines to finish their work and fully clothe the immovable trees.

Armando Zesatti’s work has traveled a long path. To understand what we see today, we must refer to pieces that might now seem strange within his trajectory: accumulations of baskets, tied bicycles, rag dolls, wooden spinning tops painted in vivid colors.

Perhaps all of these works were unconscious rehearsals toward saturating the limited space of a canvas with a wide range of tonalities, mostly green. In those earlier pieces there was an urgent, obsessive reconstruction of everything seen. The objects remained recognizable on the canvas, but they were merely accumulations of forms.

The charm of the work that now concerns us lies in the cunning of one who has mastered his craft. To confront evil directly, one must invoke it. Only by knowing how to look without discarding anything can one create a body of work such as Zesatti’s. The secret does not lie in the illuminated, protagonist areas, attractive and striking as they may be. It hides in the shadows, in the hollows, in what lies as a backdrop to a nature more powerful and raw than the one immediately presented to us.

According to attentive observers, his work calls for sedentary peace and rest. These greens envelop us in their intoxicating and blissfully deceptive perfume. The total enchantment deserving the reverence of colleagues and viewers resides in the dark zones—those that, without fully revealing nature beneath their mantle, leave it suggested as a warning of deep sea, a repository of years that stores dry leaves awaiting their pulverized return to the earth. And we stand there before it, as it happens.

Within the long tradition of creators who approach the visible object in order to subjugate it, Armando Zesatti occupies a place of significance. His interest does not center on reinventing a subverted reality in his work. Painting walls that imitate sgraffito brick can become a commonplace; resorting to facile fantasies of immaculate figures whose slick aesthetics repel more than attract, or playing with scenes of feigned madness rendered with virtuosic representation, are among the formulas already tested in contemporary art that result in a deceptive, effect-driven appeal.

This is not merely retinal painting, unsupported by the labor that validates what lies before our eyes. In his work, a rock wall illuminated obliquely by the sun is exactly that. Martin Heidegger said that “…if things had always already shown themselves as things in their thingness, then the thingness of the thing would have been revealed.” These plants are more themselves insofar as they do not pretend to be anything else. So too the rocks, the sea, a pool, coconuts, heliconias, the enormous roots of a tree, bamboo, estuaries, and cacti.

There is no greater ambition than to give each part of nature its rightful place as painted. To allow it to be seen as it is, and in doing so, to offer a discreet yet just homage of gratitude for remaining within that green realm of the imagination from which we have all drawn in recent years in order to survive devastation.

Armando Zesatti’s work today acquires the character of a document. It is testimony to a nature that presents itself with the simple dignity of what endures and evolves, treasuring millions of years of wisdom and genetic memory. His work represents the world in fragments. To assemble it would be a futile task, for what imposes itself first is to look—simply to look—and then to retrace our steps until we rediscover those parts of paradise that have been taken from us.