Back

Simply Nazábal or the Gestalt of the influences
By Rafael Grillo

In a book that was in vogue by these places, The Anguish of Influences, the North American critic Harold Bloom had remarked the uneasiness generated in the modern creator by the weight of a cultural heritage which compels him to proclaim the skeptic sentence of the Ecclesiastes: “there is nothing new under the sun”. However, a more relaxed coexistence with this true can be discovered in the artistic production from the last decades.

The recycling option of the predecessors has become, for postmodern sensibility, a way to establish an enriching dialog with the tradition and, in conspiracy with this, to assume that influences do not made us necessarily less originals but, contrariwise, as we are seeing frequently happening, they pave the way to find out the self authenticity.

In consequence, it may happen that an artist confess without blush the assimilation of certain master or some artistic movement and ignores the critic which spends his time dissecting echoes and similarities, as if nobody could be simply himself and were only recompositions from a pile of references.

This though was confirmed in my talk with Jorge Ignacio Názabal Cowan about his personal exposition The Wings of Dust (Las Alas del Polvo1). This young plastic artist get it deliberately right when combining Salvador Dalí and René Magritte —paradoxical pretension since these two can be  considered as opposite faces of the surrealist movement —, and additionally blending them with a Renaissance canon.

The stylized treatment of the human body, characteristic of the post-medieval classics2 is evident in most of his pieces, even in some of then such as Punto de Retorno (Return point ) and, La doble metamorfosis (The double metamorphosis) a punctual reference to the copy of the stance or the facial hieratism of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

Form the Catalan genius, Nazábal has eluded the deformations in objects and persons, so dear to his phase absorbed by the Freudian oneirism, to focus in the irrational effect generated by the unusual arrangement of the elements in the paint. He preferably ascribes to the Dali illuminated with the contributions of Gestalt psychology, the one of Galatea de las esferas (Galatea from the spheres), La Venus desaparece (Venus disappears) orDe cómo los cisnes se convierten en elefantes, (On how swans becomes elephants) were the author experiments with the laws of visual perception and the field notion3.

From this complicity, the young painter has extracted motives to compose his Nature woman-is (dead nature where the disposition of the vegetables recalls a female body), The family (a group of lions is organized to form a human face) or the diptych formed by Butterflies of the light and Dark Butterflies (where the continuity of a wall and a landscape is broken to show a face built with butterflies images as pieces from an incomplete puzzle).
The critic Jacques Meuris has seen in Magritte the irruption of the conceptual art because in the Belgian “the idea precedes the work”. Something similar occurs with Nazábal because there is an intellectual intention which impulses us to mentally structure the apparently unconnected arrangement of the details in the piece or to understand the replacements of one element for another (fruits instead of a woman breast, bats forming a skull) as symbols reflecting a latent content. “We are dust with wings that in a brief time period doesn’t obeys the wind; we are ephemeral beings and at the same time almost eternal”, says Nazábal in the text of the catalog, offering the key of his obsessions.

Is the idea of continuity between the human and the natural and the radical distinction supported at the same time by the building of culture; is the contrast between the alleged eternity of the cosmic order and the transitory character of the human order which explains this tension sustained by the use of emptiness and the predisposition to integrate or disintegrate the figures, recurrent maneuvers in the work of this painter.

The attempt of communion between different cultural and ideological variants from a very personal interpretation is taken even farther with the tryptic entitled The language of your lips. Two of the pieces, Western Butterfly and Eastern Butterfly pretend, separately, refer to the controversial and ancient distinction between the Western and Eastern Worlds. It flows on how the barriers created by uneven languages and traditions keep alive the aspiration to a unified Babel confined in the limp of the utopias in spite of the common element of counting with the word as a transition pulley of the though. But integrated to them is Universal Butterfly, an image of a female sex surrounded by butterfly wings, giving to the erotic function of the body the role of facilitator of intercultural communication.

Pansexual solution that, suddenly, has ceased to be too naïve in a world were the miscegenation and the cultural interpenetration are also facilitated by technological advances and human movements, in opposition to the limits imposed by the logic of domination and its attempts to phagocytate the diversity.

In such a way, the recent proposals of Jorge Ignacio Nazábal Cowan shows, along with the gestaltistic proposition that the figure emerges from the background due to the previous experience and the  proximity or vicinity of the elements, that to excel nowadays with a self discourse is not at odds with the appropriation of the paradigms from art history and the general thinking; and, therefore, the handy anxiety for getting apart of the the precursors doesn’t have to be as fierce as the lion… at least when painted. 

NOTES
1. June, 2002, Poetry House, Old Havana

2.    Here the term refers to its historic meaning and not to the current side of Cuban plastic, coined like that by the critic Jorge Bermúdez; although Nazábal could, by its insistence in evoking Da Vinci and its contemporaneous present in some of its paintings, defining himself as one of the native “post-medieval”.

3.  ”The visual fields tend clearly to the organization, since the objects included have well defined limits. Those objects tend to look as part of greater organizations called groups”: Wolfgang Köhler in Dynamic in Psychology (Edit. Paidós, Buenos Aires, 1955). Among the principles of laws of perception handled by the gestaltists are the “integrity or closure”, and of the contrast figure and background by the “previous experience” or “by contiguity and similarity”.

June, 2002
Published in Cubahora