Carmen Diez Onate

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About the Artists:

Diez- Onate was born in Cuba. Driven by a fascination with the mysteries of ancient cultures, her painting is an exploration of universal symbols and timeless myths.Her rich pictorial vocabulary and her masterful use of symbolic and painterly elements revel a mature personal aesthetic, which seeks to bring us into intimate contact with the beauty and mystery of universal myths. Her work fuses the symbolic intensity of mythological images with the skillful use of textures, colors and rhythms to create a lyrical, sensual-and sensorial-medium through which we may establish a dialogue with the universal values these images are signs of.

Diez-Oñate participated in the Holland International Art Fair in Den Hagg, Holland from April 13 - 17, 2006. A substantial part of the current artistic practice — too much of which passes for such and is in fact its negation — reveals an absence of fundamental elements that, since the beginnings of man’s wanderings in the world, and his acknowledg­ment of his environs and the perpetual experience of the unknown and the inexplicable, have led him to create a discourse of images and words into which he deposits his certainties, doubts, dreams and desires. That discourse is a ritual, the expression of a faith inhabited by questions and answers of every sort and, no less, appeals for well-being and, need­less to say, expressions gratitude. That discourse is also a reckoning of the universe that is known and an affirmation of the universe that is yearned for. In time, with an aesthetic sense at once definitive and inchoate, that discourse becomes a means by which to lend beauty to existence. During every era, children have repeated and shall always repeat this experience (although the passing of time puts them within closer reach of the marvels of progress, which, I so often fear, can accelerate the end of their precious innocence): the realm of magic, fantasy, wisdom that goes beyond its own boundar­ies, and wonder. A lost innocence, which shall for many mark a vital journey consecrated to self-redemption, and to its blessings. Everything before, in which the realm of the sacred lives as an absolute, finds its reason, possibility and essence in poetry, in whose forgetting is to be found the source of much of the increasing disaster surrounding us. Because poetry is the art of sorcery — and let us not forget the Mallarméan demand that we return it to its essential meaning and function — and it is a kaleidoscopic manifestation of what constitutes our lost nature. The quintessential cre­ators — and, I would insist, art is not a competence, but the most inalienable expression of that part of artistic creation that we have been privileged to see and interpret through the indispensable rigor of the craft — devote themselves utterly to giving form to eternity in that spirit reigned by the pulse of poetry. They are the officiants of transcendent plenitude. The painter Carmen Díez-Oñate belongs to that breed.

Born in Santiago, Cuba, and exiled in the United States since 1962, she was schooled in the strict academic regime of the Academia de Bel­las Artes de San Alejandro in Havana, Cuba, from which she graduated in 1953. She furthered her studies at the Art Students League in New York, where she pursued the art of Lithography, and at the ArtCenter of the Oranges, New Jersey, where she specialized in portraiture; and she obtained a Master’s Degree in Education at Montclair State College, also in New Jersey, where she also taught Art. Later, in Miami, she was an Art professor at BiscayneCollege, at MercyCollege, where she was also Coordinator of the department of Fine Arts, and Saint ThomasUniversity, where she also taught Education. The artist began exhibiting her work in Miami in 1963, in a group show, and ten years later she would have her first solo show in New York, at MercyCollege in Dobbs Ferry.

During this early period, following the natural course of her now completed academic training both in her native country and in exile, Díez-Oñate had achieved a luminous and exemplary body of work within the traditional canons. But already taking shape in her thinking was a change of direction for her work. It would be the foundation of what through the years has taken the shape of a rich, exquisitely crafted and beautiful work in which formal splendor and mastery of craft are given their maximum expression under two fun­damental constellations. Those signs, two forces as subtle as they are absolute, are united in a group of major works whose pulse fuses poetry with the vast record of sacred experience, of human piety.

At the root of this new domain is the passion of a vo­racious reader of poetry and, by reason of their reso­nance and invocation, of myths and legends. That confluence, the need to establish a personal realm of images capable of giving form to her reflections and her imagination and her creativity in a exercise that would redefine that space in which humans search for reason and seek to know their destiny and their own transcendence, and, no less, the need to estab­lish a signature style, lead the artist to present in 1982 the collection “Mitopoética Precolombina” at Fidelio Ponce Art Gallery in Miami. This was her third solo show, and the stepping over the threshold which defines her and which constitutes her singular contribution to Cuban painting. It is important to note that in that work, which has now seen over two decades of ceaseless refinement, prevails the great knowledge and command that Díez-Oñate has of her craft, and which, painting by painting, enriches her creative inventory. It is equally essential to note that this work places itself within the most unambiguous of painting tradi­tions.

In the first place, it is valid in and of itself. It is justified, beyond any intention or meaning, by its character as painting. Moreover, and this is also fundamental, it constitutes a break with tradition in order to reaffirm it.

In the work of Díez-Oñate we find various elements that contribute to its intelligence. For one thing, we find a will to transcend the figurative without renouncing it outright. She achieves this through a consummate understanding of the immense capacity and creative impulse of children, in which the art­ist has discerned a gift for representing not things, but forms and signs that denote concepts of things and are not imitations of reality. That is to say, they are schematic representations of abstract concepts.

Along these same lines, the artist expresses in her reflections that, as has the child, so has primitive man proceeded in identical fashion in his schematic representations of religious acts and cosmic ordina­tions. These elements can be considered fundamental in the work of Díez-Oñate. This foundation is comple­mented by the decisive prevalence that the artist gives to the theories of a master whom she admires deeply, and whose ideas have aided her in devel­oping her singular abstract vision, though in her canvases and drawings may be found the occasional representation of immediate reality. That master is Joaquín Torres-García, and it is to him, the artist states, that her work owes its symbolic character and the geometry of its structure. An essential concept of the great Uruguayan Con­structivist that governs the work of Díez-Oñate establishes that: “Geometric volume in sculpture, and form as such, should be considered before that which the volume or form represents. And once realized in such a manner, it is evident that a work can have a more elevated spiritual concept, and that this is the true, deeper meaning of symbolism, which is then direct and real, and which, can never be described or compared...” These ideas were ex­pressed by Torres-García in his book Universalismo Constructivo, in which he also states “[that] Natural­ism repudiates order, that it only wishes to take into account the representation of things as facsimiles or reflections of reality (...) and that it may be said that in order to remain in the natural order it repudiates the aesthetic order.” And he concludes: “...the artist works with forms, not things, because what he is doing is an aesthetic ordering, not the reproduction of a part of nature.” These ideas are received wisdom for the artist in terms of what constitutes the conception and execu­tion of her work. A conception that seeks and stress­es the essence and spirit of the form. The indispens­able complement in an artist devoted to giving form to an essence that is the merging of the mythical, the lyrical and the sensorial. And it is that fusion which the artist seeks, through the mythopoetic, to give shape through new imagery “to an account of deeds and stories that goes beyond the historical into the realm of poetry, and which moreover have the gift of communicating the religious beliefs of a people...,” to quote the artist.

The heroes and gods offered up by Díez-Oñate in her collection Poesías de la imagi­nación (“Poems of the Imagination”), are inspired by the resonance of an explanation of Homer’s Iliad to children, written by José Martí, poet of poets, in his inimitable journal La edad de oro. The idea of poetry as spirit and pulse achieves its first and absolute expression in the work of Díez-Oñate in her exhibition at Durban Segnini Gallery in Coral Gables in 1999.

The canvases there exhibit­ed were an act of multiplication and metamorphosis of verses by San Juan de la Cruz, Federico Gar­cía Lorca, Mariano Brull, Gastón Alvaro, Gladys Zaldívar, Uva Aragón, Luis Aguilar León and me. On the occasion of that first-rate exhibition I wrote that the words and verses contained in the paintings were more than that, that they were also “signs of the mythical and the raw material of each piece.” The essence of that idea is alive in the splendor of Poesías de la imaginación. In these new paintings, the manifest beauty and enigma of the images springs from a rigorous com­position, a sumptuous palette, a brushwork at once supple and resolute, capable of capturing evapora­tion, the allusive textures, and the dexterity with which different media are brought together.

And if these are prominent features of the work it is due to the artist’s ability to harness accident from within order, as well as her deft handling of light, which she employs in the manner of Rembrandt. This new work places itself squarely in that current of Latin American art in which context, otherness and autochthony, in the service of universality, are of the essence, an important example of which is the work of Fernando de Szyszlo, who, together with Torres-García, is an exemplar for Díez-Oñate. The rigorous execution of this work begins with a geometric ordering of horizontal and vertical lines, an ordering related to the music of Bach and which, once the primary scheme is established, allows itself to be lured by the pull of Beethoven, whose pas­sion is for the artist an invitation to disorder, to the bold brush, to the explosion of color. Master of her craft, through her use of all the formal elements of painting, Díez-Oñate bestows upon her dense and complex textures two values. One alludes to the sense of touch, while the other more subtly evokes the sense of taste through the corporeality of forms both evident and suggested. The gods and mythological figures in Poesías de la imaginación are diverse in every sense. The list comprises the paragon of self-involvement, Narcis­sus, and Nike, whose glories were at times reality and at others perpetual longing. Not absent are the goddess of the night, Selene, metaphor for poetry, both splendid and terrifying, and the damsel Ixquic, whose terrible destiny the Popol Vuh accounts. The appearance of Attabeira, mother goddess in the my­thology of the Taino Indians of the greater Antilles, is suggested by my poem, “Distancia, sueño” from my book Trenos. In this confluence of fabulous beings, Díez-Oñate reaches the height of her maturity.

This is first-rate work in which each viewing opens up new realms of interpretation. It is a major body of painting in which the force of poetry and imagination and my­thology vindicates the wonder of what always dwells in the human heart, which recognizes in its imagery that domain, usurped by implacable reality, that presents itself in these pictures with a compelling beauty and every kind of sorcery. It is nothing less than this that constitutes poetry of the imagination.

Armando Álvarez-Bravo Miami, 2005