NEITHER MEXICAN NOR COLOMBIAN
As a curator, I find that every exhibition I get involved in begins with a triggering question and a quest to respond to that provoking prompt. In 2017, the Rodolfo Abularach solo show I curated at a public gallery raised the question: After forty years of living in New York, why did he come back?
As Central Americans and as artists, our relationship to the U.S. has always been bittersweet. While we see this country as a gateway to prosperity and success, we find in it a colder landscape that substitutes care and kindness with segregation. Why come back from New York to Guatemala? I wondered if it was some sort of failure and was curious about what had failed. I couldn’t begin answering my inquiries without becoming close to the artist — seeing things through his eyes and understanding the journeys of his images.
His paintings and drawings recently found a way of coming back home in his David Nolan Gallery exhibition; this body of work was conceived, dreamt, and born in New York. A self-taught painter, trained engraver, he needed room for his greatness — Guatemala was simply too small. He found a vehicle for his vision and obtained, among many scholarships in his early years, one to study Printmaking at the Pratt Art Graphic Center in 1962.
If you look at two of the drawings in the exhibition and follow the clues of their titles, there is a performance within the expression of the eyes. Olimpia (1979) is a big black and white eye made with thin lines of ink, echoing Greek mythology. It watches its opponent in battle, like an Amazon warrior. Cassandra (1983–1986), the hesitant eye of a princess with a confused look, illustrates how the gift of divination can be a blessing and a curse; if no one sees what you see, will no one believe you? Abularach’s universe invites you on a quest. I can see how the eyes of New Yorkers showed him all these mythical characters, these images that stuck with him.
Since he lived most of his life in New York, from 1958 until 1998, his presence in Guatemala was almost as a myth — the narrative of the successful artist who made it abroad, which continues to reverberate and to which we all aspire. Abularach first won a grant by the Guatemalan government to spend a year in New York, then was a Guggenheim fellow for two years in a row in both 1959 and 1960. The same year, Abularach from Guatemala — a solo show in the Organization of American States in Washington, DC, curated by renowned Cuban curator José Gómez Sicre — invited the public to look into the world Abularach came from. At that time, Sicre was an advisor to director Alfred H. Barr, and so MoMA bought the first of many acquisitions that came over the years. These were milestones of success for a young Guatemalan, and Abularach told me these stories in a very selfless way. They were part of his everyday life, not to be revered above anybody else’s.
His work continued, and he exhibited all over Latin America. The famous Argentinian art critic Marta Traba wrote about his work in the 1995 book Hombre americano a todo color (“American man in full colour”): “How do we read these monothematic works, that repeat themselves constantly the subject of the eye, the pupil and the eyelid? Is it a simple visual exercise, of a realistic situation or a new mythology?” The myth was emerging from the artist’s inner force.
We Latinos tend to hover and gather together whenever we find each other overseas. Maybe it’s because finding someone who speaks Spanish sounds like home. As did Abularach, who became a close friend with Colombian artist Omar Rayo while they both lived in New York and later presented several exhibitions at the Rayo Museum in his hometown of Roldanillo, Colombia. He always spoke about his friendship with Rayo, and you could appreciate some of Rayo’s sculptures when you visited Abularach’s home. It would transport you to scenes of mutual support and camaraderie of the sixties and seventies. He told me about the time he helped the great Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto during an installation in the Guggenheim, and, in these anecdotes, my question began to be answered: maybe Abularach actually never left Latin America. He was always home.
It was delightful to hear the stories about the residency he did at Tamarind Workshop in Los Angeles in 1966, sharing a studio with the Venezuelan artist Gego, a great figure in the art world who was perceived as unreachable in Guatemala. In the process of this workshop, Abularach found a print in a lithographic stone, the first of his famous eyes. He retold the story with the same child-like excitement, saying that the images emerged from a source he could never fully grasp, but could sense. It was a mysterious intuitive force, perhaps a channel he opened up, as though his research mediated that sixth sense. The images appeared abruptly in his subconscious, and he just rode the wave.
He proceeded to win art prizes in many places in South America, Europe, and North America. He said that if I found him in art history books about Latin-American modern artists, in the credits, he would certainly be mentioned as Mexican or Colombian because nobody knew or heard about Guatemala or Central America. And so, Abularach was a beacon for the region, since we Guatemalans are seen (or perhaps perceived ourselves) as peripheral. His origin was unclassifiable, and his home intangible. Just as people have always assumed Guatemalan artist Carlos Mérida was Mexican, the same happened with Abularach.
THE ENERGY OF INSOMNIA
I was hypnotised by Abularach’s paintings and stories each time we met. I think I never told him that, for me, these gatherings were a time-travel capsule that took me to the New York art scene from the sixties and seventies. Perhaps he travelled with me, or he never left to begin with.
My answers led to more questions. I was, and still am, more intrigued by his life there. The eyes, planets, fires, and volcanoes all became illustrations of his versions of New York, according to my imagination. Within a city with an immense population, there are an abundance of eyes to see every day, and that can take you to other places. But the ones he drew always came from his imagination, Abularach said.
He saw a huge volcanic eruption in Guatemala in the mid-eighties. But in the way that series of paintings progressed, I sensed there was somehow a presence of New York that trickled in. The way this Dante’s Inferno bursts in lava and flames has the energy of a city that never sleeps. Even small formats — like Erupción (1991) — evoke drawing the lava from a very close distance. The Mexican painter Dr. Atl, whose work became a symbol of the new landscape tradition in twentieth-century Mexico, painted the Paricutin volcano as it was emerging from the ground in 1943. Abularach volcanoes might trick you into thinking they were done by a landscape painter, but these Guatemalan volcanoes were, in fact, done in New York. They are not the same kind of landscape: they take from the memory of the impression they caused, an effect that can be provoked by urban or emotional landscapes. My hunch is that Abularach was more interested in the fire that comes from inside, and in the eyes that erupted from his hand while drawing, than in the landscape itself.
It was during one of our meetings that Abularach told me he painted at night. The eyes, circles, and volcanoes in his work have the unrest and the scent of a place full of sleepwalkers. Their energy is subtle and mysterious; in the intensity of each line he draws and the magnetic fields he creates in the circles, I see the density of a New Yorker.
Guatemala City is quieter — it is a small town compared to New York. I am sure Abularach got bored here. You can feel the way he grasped the city’s energy in the way those gigantic eyes look at you, wide open, and in the size of his works. There aren’t any walls that big in Guatemala. He always said that going to one of his shows was not about looking at his paintings, but the paintings look at you. References from a vibrant art scene are animated by his artworks, from Magritte’s eyes to scenes from Un Chien Anadolu, from Rothko textures to all the influences of ancient pre-Columbian past and Latino hometown heritages. That wide range of symbols he had from myths of all ages makes him not only cosmopolitan but anachronistic. His body of work is in dialogue with modern painters, but also with Baroque and Renaissance artists. Mandalas, arabesque forms, and fires are a way of invoking other realms of perception. The doors he opened spiritually with his paintings are a portal to contact him — a timeless black hole.
THE DAY HE MET DUCHAMP
One time, he asked me about my artwork. I showed him pictures of a couple of installations. “Oh,” he said, “you must like Duchamp’s work! You know, I met him once.” My eyes widened like one of his paintings — I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! He thought Duchamp was a great painter.
He was picked up by a car, and when he came in, there was Duchamp, sitting inside. They were both part of the jury for an art prize. Duchamp spoke to him in Spanish, which surprised Abularach, and it turned out Duchamp had spent some time in Argentina. When they arrived at the exhibition, Abularach didn’t realise that Duchamp never entered the gallery. He found Duchamp outside and asked him what he thought about a sculpture that he was excited about. Duchamp only replied: “Do you think that one is worthy of the first prize? Go ahead, let’s declare it the winner.” Abularach was confused about Duchamp’s attitude, assuming he didn’t care at all. Duchamp wasn’t interested in modern art or art objects at all at that stage of his life. It was the mid-sixties.
THE ANSWER
The answer was simple. Abularach came back to Guatemala to live with his family and friends because his friends were passing away in New York. There, he began to build his own house museum, with his artwork and memories that came with him. The building he made did have walls big enough for those huge canvases.
