Eighteen years have gone by since my first individual exhibition, Light Poems, a proposal influenced by Emily Dickinson’s poetry and San Francis’ spaces. I was looking then for a mimesis with the verses of the North American writer, because of her obsession to make words and poem be, more than mean; and that all which has not been said, the blank spaces, the insinuation and ambiguity, reach in the discourse as much value as the explicit. 


Without having left totally behind those ways of understanding what painting is to me, I reach To Lezama, to make in the way of Lezama, which is: how the hyperthelic path of the image pierces the mirror of the Aristotelian causality to form the invisible space, thanks to a baroque simultaneity, in a spider web.


Lezama Lima, Cuban poet, king of the most absolute hermeticism, transforms words into image in order to decontextualize them: he uses images as a way to get rid of the signifier need for words, which as a result becomes free to communicate a reality of self-creation. In the words of Lezama: “As the real nature has been lost, according to Pascal, everything can be nature. My goal is to substitute nature for image.”


In To Lezama, to employ color in the suprematist sense of the word, to structure and consolidate the pictoral work – that is the hyerthelian way, “the act which defeats all determinism to go beyond its purpose.”


When observing a painting a blue stain becomes a whale swimming in the deep sea – that is the oblique experience. In the words of the Cuban poet: “What amaze me the most are the astonishing tangencies present in reality, what I have called the oblique experience, when the telephone ringing provokes in me the same sensation as the contemplation of an octopus inside a Minoan vase”.


The perspirations I reproduce in my work are the formation of a quantum space, here being there, which is nothing but the Baroque employed by Lezama as a mirror of simultaneity. “I understand Baroque to be a condition that is akin to us, a very American condition. I would say that the basic condition of our Baroque is simultaneity, which is to say, while for the Europeans is successive for us Americans is simultaneous, what jumbles ours thoughts.”


All this is governed by a spider web. “A spider creates a space that is the electricity of its letter, its communication with the invisible space, and in that field it is superior to mankind, as the spider herself secretes and manufactures it. The man also has to secrete his own space.” 


To Lezama is, in this exhibition, to go down the Lezamian paths in order to configure our own space for creation. My ambition is that this exhibition arouses in its audience that which Lezama admired in a writer: “That he handles forces that snatch him until it seems like he is going to be destroyed. That he owns that challenge and dissolves any resistance. That he destroys language and creates language. That during the day he has no past and during the night he is millenary. That the likes the pomegranate he has never tasted and that he likes the guyaba he tastes every day. That the approaches things out of appetite and distances himself out of disgust”.


Cristóbal Ortega


All the quotes by Lezama Lima have been taken from the book Así hablaba Lezama Lima by Ciro Bianchi Ross (Colección Sur, 2010).