Eliciting the Simplicity of Beauty
 John Maxim - The Herald Mexico
| | A splendid exhibition called "Siempre en otra parte" ("Always in Another Place") of 20 fine paintings at Casa Lamm Cultural Center almost crosses the frontier between representational landscape painting and abstraction. |
Painter Enrique Cattaneo, born in Mexico City in 1946, is exhibiting 20 fine works under the title "Always in Another Place" in the main gallery of the Casa Lamm Cultural Center.
It's a stunning show of minimalist landscape painting that combines a limited palette of colors, mostly grays, ochres, blues and blacks, and an austerity of geometric forms that approach abstraction, but subtly avoid slipping into it.
His generally stylized representational world, showing influences from Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel's golden haystacks in summer scenes through French painter Paul Cézanne's figureless landscapes to Magritte's surreal blue skies and U.S. artist Grant Woods' stylized simplicity of composition and use of curves, together with a mature textural technique and cleanliness of execution, is original in one particular way. It's a world that looks as though it's been hit by a neutron bomb, which destroys people and other living things but not property or land.
Unused Winding Roads
Its main iconic elements include blacktop roads with white and yellow highway lines and lined with wooden posts and wire fences, sometimes telephone poles, dissecting vast open spaces of golden farmland, disappearing into the great distances with subtly pronounced horizons that blend into the sky, or unused roads winding their ways over hills containing patches of snow and through arid mountainous passes in deserts. Not a car can be seen.
Other works with grey skies, partially snow-covered and dark furrowed fields, contain posts and wire fences and lines of tall dark silhouetted trees at various distances that create a depth of perspective where there is no boundary between skies and fields. Not a leaf, bird or animal can be seen. It's a beautifully bleak world, with total silence (not even the wind is suggested by a bending tree or branch), with no people, noise, cars or pollution. These paintings take you away from it all, and constitute a misanthrope's utopia.
Cattaneo's paintings, mainly done with a combination of oils on paper and wood, exude a sense of both spiritual serenity and psychological tension. As we view a receding blacktop or greytop road from slightly on one side of it like hitch-hikers, will a car, bus, HarleyDavidson or Mack truck suddenly swoosh past us down the road? Will the barely visible railroad sign and crossing that slightly diagonally dissect one painting ever be used by a train again?
Will the sharp curves on a hill that suggest swift movement and extend the width of the work psychologically be the site of an accident? Will the lightly swirling clouds ever produce rain on the empty, arid fields? One huge sky is so golden and luminous, we wonder if the temperature is 100 or 120 degrees Fahrenheit. You can sense the extreme heat and dryness, and almost smell the truckers' and bikers' favorite aroma, that toxic blend of gasoline, lubricating oil and tar on a macadamized road baking in the midday sun.
Occasionally using mixed media (serigraphy, etchings, intaglio, inks, watercolors), Cattaneo produces a variety of surface textures to create his subtle but solid visual effects.
Nature Without Humanity
These minimalist landscapes, which occasionally contain trees in full golden bloom, a reflecting body of water or a small house on a plain, pulse with poetry, with the tranquil beauty of bleakness that are a paean to nature without humanity. They are alive with the soothing sound of nothing, with the poignancy of loneliness, with the soulfulness of emptiness. They raise painting to the level of philosophical contemplation, which is what all fine art inevitably achieves. It makes you think and think and think.
Cattaneo's works are all geometrically consistent in one way: They are all square. One work is a pair, others are triads, tetrads and petrads, the fifth panel of which is totally abstract but appears representational as part of the whole (quite a feat), and two are muralistic abstractions that each contain 144 separate little paintings with white frames. In one of them, a graphic "Homage to Pixels," with lines of 12 bits horizontally and vertically ranging from gray through yellow, ochre, orange, and light umber, and called "Una y Otra Vez" ("Again and Again," 200 x 200 cm, 2005), each piece of the mosaic is individually signed on its frame. Another similar work with mainly greys and blues gradually deconstructs its linear uniformities at the bottom lines, and only contains one signature for the entire work. Each bit is a tiny work of art in its own right.
With this exhibition, Cattaneo displays his artistic brilliance, and skillfully delivers the genuine goods in terms of content, color and composition. His stunning works will remain on view at the Casa Lamm Cultural Center, Avenida Alvaro Obregon 99, Colonia Roma, Mexico, D. F. until August 5, 2005.
UNESCO Lifetime Achievement award winning journalist John Maxim writes regularly on Mexico’s cultural scene for The Herald. |
Vallarta Weddings
Vallarta Living | Art Talk | July 2005 
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us