Fernando de Szyszlo by Dore Ashton

Fernando de Szyszlo By Thomas M. Messer

Indivisible Solitude
Ana María Escallón

The work of Fernando de Szyszlo conceals the mysteries of a man, proclaims the internal life of circumstances, explores the ambivalence of wisdom, assumes Sartre's law of solitude according to which "no man can leave the justification of his existence in the hands of another." For this reason he has never given up on his quest for the expression of his own personal attitude in the face of life's mysteries, seeking an explanation of the human condition through shapes and colors, recreating the cosmic void through abstraction and inventing in his plastic world the Justification for continually awaiting the unsuspected situations that make his work so important. His work leaves nothing to chance. Consequently, he possesses the patience of the expert, the solemnity of the profound, the sobriety of the prudent, and the paucity of one who continually experiences the disturbing sensation of an inevitable occurrence. The truth of the chiaroscuro rules his world because in it the darkness in which destiny is unraveled meets with the splendor of vital persistence.

To refer to Latin American history is to, in a way, segregate ourselves. There are, nevertheless, those that defend the idea of a Latin American identity and Szyszlo is one of them. He is fascinated by a world that sees the history of man as an uninterrupted experience, conduit in which the different pre?Colombian civilizations have been trapped. Along with his strength in the face of the unknown we should mention his integrity as a Latin American. He is, as Marta Traba put it, "a hunter of poetry," who assumes the risks inherent in the "historic solitude" of which Octavio Paz spoke.

Szyszlo's interpretation of modern man, devoid of reasons and seeking explanations in the truth of his own circumstances, stands out as one of his most important achievements. The sacred is represented in his paintings by the ritual of love and the profane by the arid desert or the endless sea. Everything is impregnated with the absence of God, a state in which man is alone, disheartened by the certainty of his limitations and exalted by the force of his determination, fragile, caught in the storm of time, vulnerable in the face of events, humbled by infinity. Surrounded by uncertainty, he must hang on to the amazing notion that every day is different.

SzyszIo paints wonderful situations in which man stands loaded down with doubt and experience. He constructs a universe of severe shadow and deep light in order to sink deeply into human immediacy. This chiaroscuro overwhelms us with the solid security of its forms, bringing an intuitive understanding of the oneness of all things and revealing every man to be a fragment of his own reality. The color black renders his paintings mysterious and acts as a sound board, allowing him to emphasis the latent content of his work.

The space defined in Szyszlo's paintings is full of the solemnity of sacred places where human explanations mean nothing and, in reverent, austere and meditative silence he welcomes and preserves the true solitude of man. In the same way Rufino Tamayo is the painter of the sun, Szyszlo is the night stalker.

"The world is the gods' cruel game and we their toys." In this way we live in the coming and going of things, in the fleeting convenience of a few borrowed moments, trying to overcome distances that are never shortened, attempting to finish empty phrases, consume the endless and, therefore, seek out the sacred, that region where the inexplicable is gathered up.

Szyszlo paints a man seeking the significance of a mysterious cult, the truth in contingency and in the sacred, in a world of sacrifices and where unfathomable offerings are required in order to move closer to that which has no explanation. In these shapes charged with meaning anguish throbs, an intense experience.

Szyszlo is an artist who daringly leans over the bottomless well of the inaccessible. There lies the mystery; here we are. The reason for this solitude lies in the irremediable human condition. Solitude has nothing to do with a possible present, because behind all this lies the inevitable certainty of death. The inexplicable end of existence is embodied in the mysteries of life, agitated, full of doubt, somewhere between hope and despair, the joy of gatherings and the sorrow of loss, between the sweet warmth of reciprocal love and the chaos of unrequited passion.

We can therefore say that his work is completely devoid of innocence in the way it responds to the conscience of a man surviving ontological abandonment. A man capable of illustrating Vallejo's verses, incorporating an image from Proust, painting the same questions without answers as Bataille. A man who in the written word seeks the same respect for reason visible in the angular shapes of his paintings.

In this renunciation of innocence a modern critical spirit arises dissolving any trace of frivolity, leaving all truth on hold. Charged with emotion and reason, Szyszlo returns to the geometry of pre?Colombian art. He investigates the almost mystic representations of societies having left behind nothing but symbols, images in stone, rituals in ceramics, bones upon bones, sculpted gold, textiles demonstrating daily dealings with the memory of the dead, with an apparently nostalgic feeling for the original unity and lost identity. Still, in this attitude there is no feeling of melancholy because the present overpowers the past. The spirit of these civilizations still with us is recuperated timelessly, diving into the passing of history to create compact volumes, self-sufficient spaces, vivid planes and dense colors.

Szyszlo gives in to the expressiveness of his gestures, assumes the grammar of his forms, maintains the possibility of the static, dignifies the sobriety of the profound, to construct the strict permanency of surfaces upon which the meeting of sensibilities in creative liberty is possible.

He is a Peruvian who has given himself up to adventure, exploration and the quest for knowledge. He paved his own route and ventured into uncharted waters. He is a solitary genius of his generation committed to his country and ready to live in it and with its reality, choosing not the cultural richness of Paris but, rather, the loneliness of the Third World. He is a Latin American influenced by Latin Americans: Rufino Tamayo, for example. They are representatives of many generations of artists that see their identity as a personal truth and not a social formula.In his work, full of pictorial resources, a changing shape can be seen, that is not repeated because his self?criticism will not allow it. SzyszIo invariably finds alternatives for expressing his own circumstances. His paintings spring from the abstraction of a dense soul and tend toward the saturation of space. This abstraction is like a challenge, because the artist accepts himself as a different man absorbed by his own perplexity, that believes in stoic pride, the same metaphysical pride as Sartre that nourishes neither social definitions nor success, nor any recognizable superiority, nothing of this world. Consequently he finds himself miles from any risk of failure as proven by his success. His life is filled with other expectations. His confidence in the power of art comes from within and ebbs and flows according to his own circumstances. Szyszlo is, like so many Latin Americans, a loner. A man who keeps his truth well hidden and uses this truth to overcome historical obstacles and widen his horizons. He is an artist who inspires a renewed confidence in true creators because he possesses not only a solid artistic world of his own but also because in each element of his art one can observe the integrity of a soul bent on explaining life subjected to the inconsistencies of fate.


Ana María Escallón
Director
Art Museum of the America

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Fernando de Szyszlo
by Dore Ashton

Many years ago Fernando de Szyszlo showed me a poem in the Inca language, Quechua. The first line has remained with me ever since. If I remember correctly, It was an elegiac commemoration of the tragic death of the Inca chief Atahualpa, felled by the Spanish invaders, and it began with the unforgettable image: ¿Qué arco iris es este negro arco iris que se alza? What rainbow is this black rainbow that now rises? Szyszlo was deeply moved by this remarkable poem, written centuries before him by a kindred spirit born in his own country. But he was not seeking to claim it as his own, as would so many artists of the indigenista persuasion.

The poem came from Peru, his own country, but in its magisterial poetic voice, it came from all countries. The poet joined the family of poets that addresses the same human concerns, the same deep emotions, the same meditations on life and death, and above all, on injustice, that Szyszlo would recognize all his working life. The somber rainbow is his own, and also, every man's. Szyszlo's accomplishment, visible at any point in the arc of his oeuvre, is to have sustained the strong flow of his lyrical temperament. To survey his life's work to date is to know what has moved him. In a century that has turned increasingly faithless, even cynical, in its artistic life, it is of some moment that a painter has been able to keep alive his deepest responses, and even more, to begin, again and again, to try to embody them in paint. Szyszlo was largely formed as a painter during the years that the Western world, or at least Europe, was preoccupied philosophically with the idea of authenticity. The Existentialists endowed the term with resounding meanings, well aware of its Greek origins.

The word authentikos is derived from authentes: one who does anything with his own hand. implicit in the Existentialist view of existence is this insistence on the importance of the individual response; on the Shakespearean exhortation, to thine own self be true; on the ancient Greek metaphorical notion of the truth of that which is done with one's own unique hand. SzyszIo, when he arrived in Europe at the age of twenty?five, landed in the Existentialist heartland. Being Peruvian, he naturally gravitated to others from the Western hemisphere; from what José Martí had called, with a mixture of idealism and irony, a nuestra America" with the accent on a nuestra", or our America, The more sensitive denizens of Paris' Latin quarter hailing from Latin America brought with them the question of their own identity.

To what were they to be true? SzyszIo himself had already begun his lifelong inquiry into the arts of the Incas, those neighbors so distant from his bourgeois household in Lima, yet so visible at every turn. In Paris, avidly observing, savoring the richness of its cultural life, he would find confirmation of the importance of his own experiences. He was not alone. Others, such as the writers Octavio Paz and Julio Cortázar, were meeting at the Café Flore, once the salon of Jean Paul Sartre, engaging in vigorous discussions that inevitably centered on how they could participate in the international modern movement while yet preserving their discrete traditions.

Paz, older and more fully formed as a poet, had just published his own first tribute to his native tradition, the long poem "Obsidian Butterfly," which was based partly on his study of poems and artifacts of the Nahuatl culture. The young Szyszlo was soon introduced to André Breton, who held court in a café at the Place Blanche, and who had long been an enthusiast of archaic traditions, and most especially, of the cultures of Latin America. of so?called primitive arts, and his huge appetite for arcane utterance, inspired his young listeners. To this day SzyszIo can quote Breton's admonitions, among them his insistence that artists must learn to listen to "la bouche de l'ombre"?the voice from the depths of shadows. From Paris, SzyszIo proceeded to Italy for another kind of experience that would fulfill his need for work of the hand. Coming from the Western hemisphere of the south, where few European paintings could be seen, but where culture, at least at the time Szyszlo was a schoolboy, was invariably assumed to come from Europe, he needed to acquaint himself with the great founders of the painting tradition. Rather unusually for those days of avant?garde practice, Szyszlo put himself to school in the galleries of Florence, copying the masters, particularly Titian and Tintoretto. The secrets of chiaroscuro slowly revealed themselves, and it is certainly of prime importance that SzyszIo learned the art of the glaze?an old technique that he has adapted to his modern idiom?in the course of trying to reproduce the effects in Titian's paintings. By throwing veil upon veil of transparent color on the surfaces of their canvases, the old masters had given their paintings an inner life that SzyszIo recognized as essential to his own needs.

The very experience of building a painting would become the mysterious analogue of his inner life in motion. Abandoning himself to the passion that paint alone inspired in him, Szyszlo gradually worked through his artistic problems that ranged from the digestion of varying influences (Cubism, Latin American regionalism, Mexican nationalism, European informalism) to the recognition of his own poetic temperament. By inundating himself with European culture, he, like other South Americans, became acutely aware of how un?European he was. In his quest for a truth of his own making?that is, with his own hand?Szyszlo had to grapple with the troubling paradox of his being from that place known so cavalierly as Latin America, a place in which there was little that was latin. In his homeland many citizens could not even speak a Latin language. He who was delicately attuned to the voices of Europe?those vastly reverberating poets of the modern pantheon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarm6?grew up in Lima, where no doubt his nursemaids who took him strolling spoke Indian dialects, and had the coloring of the high Andes. In early childhood he saw the rich colors of Indian textiles and the shapes of their pottery and the immense drama of the Peruvian landscape.

Like most of his confrores in Paris and Florence, SzyszIo was only dimly aware of how much his native land had lodged Itself in him. His emotional needs were naturally greater than any local scene could satisfy. Like most Latin American artists and poets, he had to touch down in the great capitals of Europe to discover his native self. The important sojourn 'in Europe had emboldened him to be who he was: a painter who would seek always to express his "self" as it really was: a hybrid, excited self that sought the truth of his existence not only as a modern universalist, but also, as a man bred in a certain place rich in artistic traditions. All of this is not to say that Szyszlo embraced that Latin American provincialism known as indigenismo. It is evident in his paintings that SzyszIo roams far from the folklorist's Peru. While he has for years visited the sites of the Chancay culture; collected its textiles and artifacts; inquired into its world views and rituals, Szyszlo has never specifically attempted to illustrate his findings. Rather he speaks of his wonder. But it is a wonder akin to that of Baudelaire, whose poems of shadowed interiors or tropical paradises are as clairobscur as SzyszIo's paintings, graced with imagined flights of stairs or dark happenings that the human eye and mind can scarcely discern.

In SzyszIo's vocabulary of painterly imagery, there are certain obsessive returns that place him firmly in the great romantic tradition. If I think of his oeuvre as a whole there are certain key images as there always are in the oeuvres of poets. There are the architectonic references to stairways to nowhere. There are tongues of flame. There are windswept mesas and moonlit savannahs. There are congealed signs that are both human figures and idols. There are knives. There are altars. And there are always nocturnal hues that hint at inscrutable events. These references to where SzyszIo lives emotionally have been constant for more than forty years. As early as 1959 Octavio Paz would observe that "Szyszlo does not change; he matures. He advances within himself." When I look at Szyszlo's most recent work I confirm Paz's insight. Szyszlo has not changed, but he has certainly matured. Years of what Paz called a struggle between rigor and spontaneity have strengthened his hand.

The intonations of other artists such as Tamayo, Matta or Miró have faded, while the certainty of SzyszIo's own accent has advanced. I look at the vertical La Habitación Número 23 completed just weeks ago. It is one of several paintings inspired by a poem by Enrique Molina. Szyszlo has long used poetry, particularly surrealist poetry, to initiate in him a mood, a climate in which his imagery can expand. The touchstone here is Molina's designation of a specific. interior space, room number 23, presumably in a dilapidated, perhaps even sinister hotel. I don't know the poem, but I know through my own literary culture how a desolate hotel room inspires thoughts of unspeakable happenings; of lives and ruin; of smells and shadows of clandestinity. Szyszlo evokes here all that can be associated with the drama of a mysterious interior by means of veering light sources and intricate symbols that hint but never describe. Just as in a surrealist love poem, the climate, although evoked in hues of theatrical blue?green and cool deeper blue, is saturated with erotic undertones. The intricate symbol that must stand for the human presence is painted into obscurity, its only anchor being the floor boards that, like everything in the oneiric universe, are never quite stable, and will never arrive at a vanishing point. It is characteristic of Szyszlo's paintings dealing with interiors that the theater?like setting can never be rationally analyzed for, as in dreams, things slip and slide into other things, and are interrupted by the onslaught of irrationally disposed lights.

This suggestive nocturne is borne on the tide of a dramatic imagination that ineluctably evokes correspondences in the best surrealist tradition. Another recent painting: Ritual Table. This is one of many in his lifetime 'in which SzyszIo returns to dark places known to the people of Chancay. He has always been an assiduous student of what he calls the quest for the sacred. In the local traditions descending from the Incas he imagines the rites in an atmosphere of almost impenetrable night. His black on black rides over a pattern indited beneath the surface, where flickers of scarlet suggest the sacred fire, and purples and violets evoke the raiment of the actors in this ritual drama. But if he evokes ceremony, he also establishes the climate in human drama, whether in ancient Peru or in modern Peru, plays itself out against the indifferent gaze of the cosmos. Has human experience ever changed? Szyszlo is not naive. Wherever there is ritual, there lurks the fearful?that is, the unknown, or death.

Szyszlo's intimations are the familiar stuff of latent dreams and contemporary reality, translated into the mute language of paint. It is no accident that he has painted several images with a title drawn from Samuel Beckett: The Unnameable. Anyone who has plied the coast north and south of Lima, or known the hot winds of Pisco, where Szyszlo spent time as a child, will recognize certain landscape allusions in his paintings. Beneath spectacular sierras lie sandy deserts fronting the sea in absolutely startling confrontations. The great contrasts of light and substance have not escaped Szyszlo's painter's eye. He paints Vent Oscuro, a memory of how it feels to be caught in the rain of sand that every so often obliterates all sharp form on the Lima coast. He paints Mar de Lurín, many versions of the beach south of Lima so near to the pre?Hispanic sites he repeatedly explores. In these paintings, the woven symbols (or perhaps not symbols but only a sense of the rhythms of the sea found in ancient textiles) find their way into intricate compositions where they divide between sea and sand, between earth and sky, between figure and ground, is never explicit, but rather, woven into the climate of the whole. Here the gamut of Szyszlo's preferred palette: lambent reds, deep purples, hot pinks and lade greens, and of course, midnight blacks, is given full rein, their most saturated condition emphasized by flicks of impasto, For all the reference to local sites, Szyszlo cannot be charged with localism. In each painting there are palpable signs that their author is travelling through the entire universe, seeking analogies. For a time, he worked with St. John Perse's imagery in Anabase, the extended reveries inspired 'in the poet by the Gobi desert.

The shifting sands of the Gobi are no different in conformation, texture, light, from the sands of Peru's coast, or the sands of Long Island where Szyszlo sometimes works. The experience of desert can be called up by means of abstraction, as even Balzac knew. It is one of the grand and mysterious designs of nature that fills the lyrical temperament with awe. It is awe, not place, that Szyszlo is most intent on expressing. Once that is understood, the viewer can find himself in these paintings which are meant to, and do, transcend specific time and place. Szyszlo is fond of quoting D.H. Lawrence (who incidentally was another admirer of deserts) who said that a human being "Is a column of blood within a void." If one thinks of all the possible associations in this verbal fragment-columns, verticals, freestanding man, blood, coursing, pulsing, voids, caverns, cosmos and the unknown contained by the void?one has a portal through which to enter the animated climate of Szyszlo's paintings.

Fernando de Szyszlo
By Thomas M. Messer

Perhaps the most interesting phase in a human life, and therefore in the lives of artists, is that of vocational formation. Once the principal outlines of a creative pursuit are determined we may be rewarded by the resulting accomplishments, by the mastery attained, even by an artist's continued self-renewal. But the critical development lies in the preceding metamorphosis from vague initial divination to a curiosity instinctually engendered toward as yet unknown objectives.

The gradually emerging sense of a specific direction followed by an imperious need for solidification, and the eventual arrival at an appropriate road toward unique existence?these are the crucial and decisive stations in the human voyage. Because graphically traceable they become visible in the stages of an artist's development. Such progression differs of course from case to case but typical patterns are nevertheless observable. Thus, an artist's first perception will often be of culture in its broadest guise?an admiration for its monuments and a yearning to appropriate their meanings.

That great art may be occurring in one's own time is a suspicion that matures only gradually. But once confirmed it will, in our time, inevitably evoke the demigods of classical modernism. From here on, the searching spirit will be drawn by a seemingly irresistible gravitational force toward ever more up-to-date insights until the realm of the commonplace is exhausted and ready to be discarded. For most painters, indeed for most of us, this point of awareness represents an end station for, only few are fated to reach levels of varying depth that lie beyond it. But it is precisely those who by a stricter definition of the term may properly be called artists. The Peruvian painter Fernando de Szyszlo illustrates the process of formation in interesting and to a degree deviant ways.

He conforms to the normative process of acculturation by way of his partially European origins and the example of his Polish scientist father. His Peruvian birth and the environment of his youth, however, precluded contact with the tangible sources of western art. The Louvre, the Prado or other treasure troves open to those within their orbit, were simply not initially accessible to young Fernando. An indigenous condition traceable to his Peruvian mother, enormously enriched the painter's emotional range thereby providing the alternative richness of a precolumbian past. But although extensively mined by Szyszlo throughout his creative life and notwithstanding its obvious nourishing value, this resource lay too far afield from the central currents of canonical culture to function as a self?sufficient formative element. It soon became clear therefore that the artist's early efforts in his native Peru would remain stunted if he could not enlarge his horizons through first hand acquaintance with historic and original works of art. A pilgrimage to the sources became imperative and was in fact realized through his first visit to Europe at the age of twenty-four.

The Paris of the postwar period was a natural magnet for creative young Latin Americans and Szyszlo was one among many others to choose the French capital as the point of contact with contemporary thought and art. The move was foreshadowed by the revelations of Surrealism that had already reached him in Peru and that represented the decisive step from culture to creativity, from the generation of masters to that of contemporaries. It was immaterial in this context that Surrealism was almost exactly as old as the painter himself and it is unlikely that Szyszlo realized at the time that as a motivating force, in an objective sense, it had largely spent itself. What mattered was the contact with a pictorial language that would enable him to remove himself further from the restrictive precepts of his initial academic training toward the potentialities of automatism (for it was that aspect of Surrealism rather than the exploitation of Breton's dream world) that were pertinent for the Peruvian's groping advance. Yet, coming to terms with Surrealism merely signified Szyszlo's embrace of a reigning modernism.

To move further to the edge of a then current awareness he needed to discover for himself the language of abstraction. It is difficult for us, half a century later, to remember or to reconstruct the heady experience of a non?objective mode. This despite the fact that, as in the case of Surrealism, one could not have thought of abstraction as new. Kandinsky's and Mondrian's radical breakthroughs, their arrival at a style that claimed for painting an autonomous role comparable to that of music and therefore its independence from the subjects of the surrounding phenomena, even then lay more than thirty years behind. But it was actually not before the war and postwar years in Europe and the United States that abstraction had emancipated from an essentially theoretical awareness to the reigning avantgarde language of its time. And since we identify Kandinsky and Mondrian as its fountainheads a choice was implied for younger artists as it was for Szyszlo. Which way to go was for him and for many others basically a matter of disposition. Classicism or Romanticism, Cubism or Expressionism, geometric or biomorphic abstraction? It required a decision in keeping with deep seated inner commitments.

>For Szyszlo and, for that matter, for the mainstream of postwar painters the arrow pointed toward free form, toward abstract expression in New York and toward the informal in Paris. The dye thus was cast and from this point on Fernando de Szyszlo was on his own in his search for an idiom that would mold the various inherited currents into a pictorial language which through a personal handwriting would establish its uniqueness. It was at this point that Szyszlo felt the need to return to Peru thereby identifying with an already progressing search for a collective Latin American identity. The artist's now mature development demonstrates the complexity of such a program. For, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as Latin America, except as a geographic expression. Postwar art in the South American republics has had a unified appearance only on its politically contrived propagandistic level that adhered to an artistically invalid quasi?indigenous mode.

Advanced art in the Latin American centers had long hence freed itself from this fiction enabling it to proceed along the various paths that international modernism held out to it. Apart from largely dated post?Cubist and Fauve trends and in addition to the various Surrealist modes, the painters of Latin America in Caracas, Bogota, Rio, Buenos Aires, Santiago and Lima embraced what the postwar period, the example of Paris and much later that of New York had to offer. That this does not exclude the existence of an authentic ethos in south American lands, linked as some are by a common aboriginal heritage??an ethos susceptible to formal proyection, has been amply demonstrated by pertinent and vital expressions in all the arts with literature in the lead. But the mode of such proyection, if authentic and valid, has been oblique and inevitable rather than programmatic or obligatory. In the hands of its leading practitioners it came from the depth of an attuned sensibility capable of exceeding the banal application of a merely referential iconography.

Where it existed it convinced through forms and images that had, somewhat mysteriously, acquired the power of identifying underlying collective realities. The art of Fernando de Szyszlo meets such exigencies. As his vocational formation demonstrates, his life work is the result of a studied absorption of cosmopolitan values. At the same time, Szyszlo's ethnic roots as well as a natural identification with underlying features of the country of his birth, allowed him to absorb and bring to the fore its summary marks. The fusion of intellectual attainments with emotional wealth are not mutually exclusive but instead introduce a pregnant creative tension that are at the base of the artist's resulting style. It is not irrelevant in this context to refer to Szyszlo's personality which the artist himself has aptly characterized as "proud, modest and shy". Pride, one may interpret after many years of acquaintance and friendship with the artist, pertains to a well earned confidence in his existential authenticity, one that has comprehended its vocation at an early stage and adhered to it unswervingly, even stoically, in the face of adversity, poverty and lacking recognition.

Modesty, in Szyszlo's case would be rooted in an awareness of what it means to be an artist and in the inevitable discrepancy that he continued to perceive between spiritual objectives and their material realization. Shyness, finally is seen as an attribute of art. Szyszlo himself states in an interview with Ana María Escallon that "art entails shyness because, like love, it is a very private act." It is thus, a personality of considerable reach that has brought to his surfaces an art simultaneously sophisticated and primitive, one capable of wedding an innate lyricism with the force derived from autonomous material expression.

Szyszlo
by Mario Vargas Llosa

There is perhaps no better definition of life than movement, and no greater eulogy for an artist than to refer to him as someone who never stops creating, whose work is continually changing. Movement, change, are attitudes that have always governed the artistic work of SzyszIo, and furthermore, both have lately become themes incorporated into his work. In his work of the past few years these themes have crystallized occasionally in the form of figurative motifs, whereas in his abstract paintings they were always suggested, felt, and once even erupted explicitly in the form of flocks of birds.

These themes are incorporated into his work in many ways. At one point, as studies of doves in flight, in an attempt to surprise, capture, render eternal lines and shadows the grace and harmony, the secrecy and Joy of this incomparable spectacle: a bird tearing through the air. A banal occurrence, an experience repeated and observed over and over again to the point of boredom, all it takes, nonetheless, is an intelligent and dexterous hand capable of documenting the event and committing it to canvas for this insignificant atom of reality, the flight of a dove, to be transformed into a fathomless mystery, a flagrant wonder. There are, naturally, many forms of movement and an infinite number of possible changes. Szyszlo's is a movement in place and an inward change. In other words, movement that doesn't take him from his essential and nurturing roots, allowing his paintings to progress only upwards, and a change synonymous with exploration and a visceral penetration of this piece of reality on which his art Is founded, from which he extracts his motifs, his symbols, his madness and his strength. A style of painting that, like a tree or a man, matures, grows, moves around and is at all times another while remaining the same. One of the most highly praised aspects of Szyszlo's art is the way in which he brings together the ancient and the modern, bridging the gap between European abstraction and pre?Hispanic craftsmanship, traces of which linger in his paintings like an old memory or feeling of nostalgia.

There are critics that consider his greatest artistic achievement to be the decidedly "Peruvian" mark he left on a seemingly rootless art whose function is not to portray historical reality but rather to evade it. Certainly this phenomenon is a more picturesque than important part of his work ? what great artist does not combine in one way or another the traditional and the avant garde to express, through action or omission, his own circumstances? This is by no means its richest aspect. The Peruvian quality of Szyszlo's work ? that which, without a doubt, he strove to emphasize in many ways in the titles of his paintings, through the use of Peruvian events and men as creative stimuli and making a point to live and work in Lima ? is a mere curiosity, something which, from an artistic point of view, only touches upon the essential. It is convenient to single it out in these days of resurrection of cultural nationalism (the most misplaced form of nationalism), In art, the patent of nationality (always so difficult to grant, except on very capricious occasions) is no aesthetic attribute, is never a guarantee of achievement. Therefore, before referring to this characteristic of SzyszIo's work I would rather bring up a few others that, I believe, endow his paintings with a persuasive energy, an ability to seduce whomsoever finds himself within range. The first of these is his elegance, virtue that might be defined as the wisdom of degree, the talent for keeping, in his relationship with himself, with things and other people, a certain distance. I know of no other living painter, with the exception of Tapiés, who is, in whatever he does, as coherent in his technique of keeping the spectator at a certain distance from his world, of making him, through the use of a formal strategy, observe what is on display from a respectful perspective.

Szyszlo's work is neither quickly nor easily understood and, perhaps, one of his greatest constants is the way he inevitably leaves the spectator with the impression of having had something magically taken from him, that that which he sees and admires is only the tip of the iceberg. Instead of pushing the spectator away SzyszIo's paintings themselves stand back from him. A style of painting that does not surrender, turned inwards upon its own intimacy, that shuns sensual complicity and demands of the spectator a more aesthetic contemplation", as Octavio Paz put it. It Is an astute observation. While visiting SzyszIo's studio I have witnessed the different phases in the birth of one of his paintings. It is a fascinating process which begins outside and works its way in, progressively concealing, repressing the theme and color, a passage from the affirmative to the allusive, from the explicit to the implicit.

The first phase is a drawing of steady lines, a spectral figure-?wake, disks, tomb, etc.-?of clearly drawn outlines. This skeleton is then fleshed out In layers of paint that take on an extreme tonality, an aggressive light: shape and color reach an exhibitionist state of total nudity. These "hot" images ?like the images without mystery, that reveal, all referred to by filmmakers ? then undergo a process of cooling or dissimulation. It is in this final phase that the painting Is impregnated with that elegant quality: reserve. New layers of paint begin to dim its light, doing away with the existing borders between colors and shapes, concealing it, little by little transforming its certainty into doubt, its movement into vacillation.

Everything is shaded, withdrawn, quieted. In this way is born that insurmountable distance for the spectator who is unable to see all that the artist ha submerged, he can only feel it, The expressive violence, not abolished but, rather, disguised behind subtle chromatic veils, goes all the way through the canvas, injecting it from the shadows with a subterranean power, something like an urgent need that from the depths struggles to get out and disturbs the visible surface of the painting and ignites it.

Out of this censored context is born yet another deep constant in the work of Szyszlo: the mystery, his ability to intrigue us and send our imagination off toward an unreachable yet flagrant element that haunts his paintings (as is said in Peru of certain old houses stricken with strange noises: that they are haunted by spirits). Pure abstraction does not exist. Geometric or lyrical, some form of association is always created in the soul of the spectator between those glacial lines or tumultuous stains, between that arithmetic of dots or acrobatics of lights, and some element of concrete reality: the unexpected and repetitive geography created by wind on sand felt when contemplating Dubuffet's wrinkles or the nightmare of bureaucratic confinement, the horror of the regimentation of life we feel when we find ourselves in front of Mondrian's squares. (I am, naturally, speaking for myself: I don't doubt there are those capable of liking a painting for its color without placing it in an exterior context, but I am afraid that where this is true, and this goes for literature and music as well, it is a poor view, since the artistic object ? be it auditive, visual or intellectual ? is improved each time it awakens in the spectator some affinity with human experience).

But in Szyszlo's case, contrary to other non?figurative painters, this process of connecting the painting with concrete reality is not produced, not so much because of any fateful predisposition on the part of the spectator who can only, in order to take emotional possession of the painting, associate it in some way with an experience taken from his own life and who then proceeds to carry out this operation in total freedom (which in this case means arbitrarily), but because of a discreet yet insistent demand made by the painting itself, rooted firmly and objectively in an exterior reality, although, due to the discreet nature of which it is so proud, they only show up as suggestions or hints. One could make a very instructive study of these allusions ? deliberate, unconscious, fortuitous ? to a figurative reality in Szyszlo's art, because in this curious way of insinuating without insisting, of suggesting without imposing (elegant means of expression) resides the mystery that shrouds his paintings, the reason his paintings seem, among other things, enigmas. Javier Sologuren warns that certain recurring motifs in Szyszlo's work are of an emblematic nature and points out certain rational equivalence found in these features: "Such as the small circles in branches and bouquets going to seed or dripping: seeds, blood or sperm whose meaning seems linked to the vital order of transmission, procreation and fecundity, as well as the lance and the crevice that are undoubtedly part of some intimate sexual code associated with the archetypical images that nurture his expression."

This during a period in which his paintings were frequently filled with certain semi?spheres, compact fruit?like beings hanging in the void, and from whose branches ?wounds, mouths, vaginas? gushed forth cascades of balls. It is inevitable that these images should be associated with positive notions of birth, germination and the repetition of life, but they also contain elements of decomposition and agony. In other periods, certain dark stains that suggested nature in its most primary state were the privileged guests of these canvases. Before then, plants and fish, an inert world, stone. Later, from this solid material sprang, like a skin, a smooth and silken shape, light, bundles of feathers adding to the canvas a more animated and elevated form of the already existent: air, birds, movement, Simultaneously, these associations, in the same shape of stones and feathers, suggest something more subtle than a simple categorizing of reality: the hoop, the axe, the sacrifice, the propitiatory victim, a primitive ritual, magic.

At another time SzyszIo's paintings were filled with disks, almost always dark, sometimes divided, that often appeared in pairs, on smooth surfaces: black suns, lunar eclipses, eyes in the night, astral sexes, meteors suddenly stopped in the middle of their vertiginous flight and whose viscous matter seems still prisoner of a secret uneasiness: these motifs are, for me, not only related to the infinite space of the planets and stars (and, in this way, to human reality and the occultist practices and astrological symbols), but also, and I can't say why, to the idea of death. (In his early non?figurative paintings other stellar representations appear: crescent moons, stars). These paintings are almost always two?dimensional, surfaces without depth in which figures and their environment are at equal distances from the spectator. Then, suddenly, perspective appears, a deep and symmetrical atmosphere, a large and sumptuous room with a tiled floor on which, in the foreground, stands a monumental figure, architecture in the form of a prism, hybrid totem from whose body spring claws, nails, eyes, teeth, feathers. When SzyszIo lived in Paris (1949?1955) he was close to, affectively, Breton. It is during this period, when his paintings change into Renaissance?style chambers inhabited by that dark idol of monstrous juxtapositions, in which he comes closest to the best surrealism: the visionary who, as in the paintings of Max Ernst, Magritte or Delvaux, places us in contact with an unknown dimension and extracts its beings from the most secret areas of human darkness: instinct, the subconscious, sleep. And yet, as always with SzyszIo, these paintings allow for different and contradictory perceptions, for the plurality of associative virtualities, of clues found within. One of them is rational and realist.

The magic confines are also stage settings and in them we watch a show. Not just a plastic representation, a dialogue of shadow and light, the whisper of tonalities, the rhythm of volume, but also the exhibition, only slightly less than anecdotal, of an allegorical drama. It is this unusual and authentic character that gives the painting its power of suggestion. The room is a stage not only because its luxury and coloring and its faults (it has no sides, it is firmer and more visible as one approaches it, but the horizon is a thin, atmospheric insinuation) make it so, but more so because of the position of the actor: disguised as a puppet or an idol, representing unmistakably an elemental and illogical world that contradicts the world of refinement and mental harmony in which it is being exhibited. This is the function of these paintings: the harsh, upsetting and difficult but possible (the work of an artist like Szyszlo is the best proof of this) meeting of two worlds, two stories, two cultures, two eras, two activities vital to the fertile unity of art. In these representations we attend a soliloquy of the artist speaking of his own work and about his sources of inspiration, about cultural and historical identity in a world in which, like in Latin America, these two extremes?-the primitive and the civilized, the rational and the magic, the refined and the barbaric-?touch each other and constitute options. In spite of being, in his apparent scorn of the descriptive, so profoundly plastic, Szyszlo's art is never directed solely at the spectator's senses. It also speaks to his intelligence and to his culture.

This is another aspect of his work which I'd like to speak of: the presence of the cultural factor that shows up 'in various forms. The most obvious is, of course, the system of literary and historical references from which so often spring his paintings, lectures, ideas and the events intimately stirred up by them. "I am tired of the belief that all painters are stupid", complained, in his final years, one of the most lucid painters of our time, Marcel Duchamp, The truth is that a good number of contemporary artists paint exclusively with their hands, read little and never think (there is nothing so depressing as those round table discussions where a group of plastic artists theorize about what they do).

SzyszIo belongs to the minority of modern creators that maintain the tradition of the humanist painters, for whom painting is the expression of a sensibility and intelligence nurtured with water from many cultural springs, ranging from philosophy to science, who for this reason hope to project their work into other fields of human endeavor, and who have always refused to consider their art a "specialty". Among the authors, events or works of art to whom he has rendered homage (Rimbaud, Breton, Vallejo, Arguedas, the Quechua poem "Apu Inca Atawallpaman", the execution of Tupac Amaru, Cajamarca, etc.), in the themes or titles of his paintings, in his own writings (this outside information which the specialist scorns is of real importance. It serves as orientation when viewing the painting, is a helpful guide, a useful way of getting closer to the painting for those interested in enjoying art not only sensorially but intellectually as well) SzyszIo reveals the same good taste and demanding strictness that presides over all his experiments with form and light.

Nonetheless, I don't think it is in this exterior manifestation alone that the cultural presence felt, but also in the very hearts of the canvas, in the nature of the images. Can one speak of an intellectual and cultural element in a painting without anecdote? Yes, and not only because of its ambiguous system of allusions, at times subliminal, to a figurative reality ? although there is no doubt that they are present: what if not "cult" content is this I have mentioned: the vital cycle of reproduction and death, astral reality, the order of existence, the primitive practices of sacrifice and magic, theatrical allegory? ? but also on a strictly technical level, in his system of evocation ? citation, mention, appropriation ? of traditional and current plastic arts, to those sources that have supported and stimulated him throughout his artistic career: Picasso and the pre-Columbian paintings of Chancay, Klee and Chavin's huacos, Hartung, Soulages, Tamayo, etc.

There is no such thing as a painter without influences, only those capable of discerning and therefore lucidly controlling these influences, and those incapable of doing so and who allow themselves to be governed blindly by them. The former are painters we can refer to as "cult". In SzyszIo's paintings there is another presence that, although no doubt there from the start like an unconscious memory, an underground spring whose waters occasionally manage to rise to the surface of the canvas, in the past few years has become more manifest: the coastal landscape. I will avoid calling it the Peruvian coast, because this wouldn't be exact. The geography of this region, its splendid night sky blotted with stars, its calm sea whose surface is broken by islands like stone divinities, its majestic and, ghostly dunes with gulls and pelicans flying over, can naturally be identified with the painter's experience, with the Lima coastline and that of Iquitos (as indicated by the common title of his latest series of paintings: (Camino a Mendieta/Road to Mendieta), but its characteristics are not much different than those of others beaches and deserts in America, Mexico and the Caribbean, in the north of Brazil and undoubtedly other places as well, What is the reason for this presence once so well hidden and now so flagrant? The fact that there are many answers to this question is another indication of the complexity of the process behind all genuine art, of the contradictory ingredients that make it what it is. This landscape has furnished Szyszlo with shades of color, fertile ideas for organizing space, combining movement and creating forms.

It is a landscape that offers itself up to contemplation like an endless plastic wonder whose beauty is as mysteriously static and changing as that of the stars. It has also offered him a form of symbolism, a motive for inspiration and-?perhaps most importantly-?it has tied him to a tradition, but in a very free way and without making him a slave to it. The most tangible aspect of the landscape I am referring to is that of nature in its purest state, a natural arcade, predecessor of man and history, an undiscovered world, undomesticated, both possessor of a boundless freedom, seeing how it serves no one and has no other obligation than to simply exist, and representation of the promise of a happy life, of perfection, of destiny fulfilled. In some ways this kind of landscape personifies the impossibility that lurks in the heart of so?called abstract art, a reality made up of only shapes and colors, beyond ideas and uninhabited, and therefore free of the bonds of human existence and of the tiresome degradations which the passage of time imposes on all life, a world safe from that inevitable aggression inherent in the arrival of man, who unlike an animal, is never happy to simply coexist with the elements and must always tame them (which in the long run means destroy them).

To take possession artistically of this natural landscape, sovereign and indomitable, requires a kind of sympathetic magic from a painter. A desire to impregnate the canvas with a fate similar to that contained in the shapes and colors within it. In other words, the unpolluted and eternal condition: is not the secret aspiration of all artistic vocation the triumph over death, the escape from the perishable fate of all humans by way of lasting beauty? This hunger for the absolute explains, at least in part, the rejection of representation in non?figurative art and it is this same ideal ambition, somehow incarnate in the coastal landscape, that pushes SzyszIo to remove himself from what we find in the final paintings in the "Camino a Mendieta" series (perhaps his most beautiful) in which, in spite of its multiple deviations and transformations, figurative reality turns up again in these sun?soaked and indolent dunes that shine up above like fireworks, myriad stars. There is yet another thing. In a non?geographical way this coastal landscape is specifically Peruvian. Its soil is soaked in history, bolls like a necropolis where a society of squatting mummies are lined up and surrounded by paintings and objects that the parched atmosphere has preserved almost intact throughout the centuries. Yes, this landscape is unpopulated only on its surface. Underneath its limpid sands lay buried cultures that, in the artistic world, once possessed their own voice, their own original way of expressing their lives and dreams, their fears and desires.

Long before the Spanish conquest when European cultural themes and values were implanted in Peru. Compared to the mountain civilization of Tahuantinsuyo that achieved a remarkable level of social development and established a vast empire, the coastal cultures such as Nazca and Paracas are small and weak, almost insignificant. But from an imaginative and creative point of view ? not dependent upon geopolitics ? they were more daring and left behind works of extraordinary vitality. Szyszlo, although often known to protest against cultural nationalism, has never concealed his fascination with the art of these remote coastal Peruvians that, isolated from their brothers in other parts of the world, resolved by themselves the problems inherent in artistic creation with ingenuity comparable to that employed by European artists of the same era and marked their textiles, ceramics and utensils with shapes that recreate life and are perfectly intelligible to modern man, still subjugated and enriched by them. This genuine and ancient art, foundation of Peruvian culture and to whom the official Peruvian cultural, in spite of a lot of nativist rhetoric, has not been able to do Justice, sprang from this very coastline whose colors, fish, birds, hills metamorphosed audaciously. Between the two a strong complicity has been established which no Peruvian artist can ignore. Perhaps this is the decisive element explaining the presence of this coastal landscape in the work of Szyszlo.

Peruvian art, in the last century and in this one, has made many attempts to revive the tradition interrupted by the Spanish conquest. Rarely has it succeeded. Perhaps because it set out to do so and this deliberation spoiled the attempt by killing the spontaneity as vital as any thought process to the existence of authentic art. In other attempts, mere mention or imitation of pre?Incaic motifs turned their authors from folklorists to artists, passive epigons of a tradition. Until now it has been almost impossible to drink from these wells without losing freedom of invention, without falling into that picturesqueness equivalent with short?term, superficial vision. Curiously enough, SzyszIo, without deliberately doing so and after many years of opting for just the opposite?-a formally rootless and cosmopolitan art-?ends up coinciding with this tradition, drawing closer to it without suffering any damage. His success is perhaps due to the fact that he did not drink directly from the well of the traditional Peruvian plastic arts but skirtingly, vicariously nurtured his art with the same landscape that nourished theirs, recreating in his own fashion the material that they recreated. In this way, without wanting to do so and jealously defending his creative sovereignty, reaffirming his gift for the universality that spurs all artists on, SzyszIo's art starts a dialogue with that fertile culture waiting below the sands for its hour to come in a landscape that is simultaneously the theme of this dialogue and its intermediary. Finally, there is a component of Szyszlo's painting that must be mentioned after the others because in a way it brings them all together and is a consequence of this alliance: the erotic.

This style of painting demands not only to be seen but also divined, fantasized and read. It also screams out to be touched. It is a powerful incitement originating more in the texture than the color of the painting, literally understood like the compact weave of the canvas, a mesh of fibers, erogenous skin with silken and rough patches, soft and hard, demanding to be handled, physically felt. This painting that offers its skin as an object of desire is the same one whose content slips away and is lost, the same one that, as we have seen, demands the spectator keep his distance in order to be enjoyed. A mixture of invitation and rejection, erroneous dance in which one is simultaneously attracted and repelled, nearness and distance become muddled, the magic of possession and loss. Is this not the game of love, the relationship that spawns desire, that keeps passion alive, that renews pleasure? In Szyszlo's paintings, together with the creation of his "reliable" creatures, classical exercises, are their counterparts: radical clisfigurements of reality, hybrids created from objects and beings taken from real life mingling and disintegrating to the rhythm of imagination. Or, more aptly, to the rhythm of desire, since we are speaking of works 'in which an erotic element is visible. All his paintings are variations of the same phenomenon: Metamorphosis. And in all of them, like a placenta, inalterable foundation of all composition, Szyszlo's ancient motif is present: the stone figure-?a totem, an idol, tumultuous trail-?around which he has for many years organized his paintings. At times goats' hooves and women's breasts spring from this figure like the statue In the poem by Rubén Darío. Feminine touches heat up and sensualize the stone, turning it into an erogenous object, motive and source of pleasure.

Also in these same paintings, the bird, an old tenant of the painter's private mythology, reappears and mixes with these elements. I speak not of these allusive details ? the feathers, claws, spurs and beaks ? associated with the birds found in pre-Hispanic textiles and pottery, in other words, the bird of art and history, of dreams and folklore, but the bird of life and vigilance, that we observe dying, failing to pieces, blending in with the stone, changing into a sacrificial altar, the stage for a bloody ceremonial offering. De Sade and Bataille's lugubrious theory that eroticism is inseparable from death, that amorous desire, the complete manifestation of life, harbors within itself its own negation, since, allowed to run its course it is always violence that demands the destruction and death of the desire object, appears in the form of allegory in some of Szyszlo's paintings. In the ancestral totem, desire in the form of crackling breasts, womanly flourishes, is united with death, present in the aviary corpses with a warm, recently sacrificed air ? becoming one while remaining separate. Love and death: a representation of the two extremes between which the life of man oscillates.

If all painting, whether formal or informal, old?fashioned or avant?garde, contains a theatrical element, the cheerful or tragic dialogue within a fateful (inescapable) space where those present have been assembled by a sovereign and exterior force in order to communicate something, in Szyszlo's work this quality is particularly evident. This dialogue, silently carried out by figures whose boundaries dissolve in each other, are reflections on the main preoccupations of the human condition, the hunger for pleasure and the awareness of extinction, the urgency of desire and the premonition of death. By appealing to the entire sensorial realm and opening so many doors on sensual pleasure and rational analysis, Szyszlo's work encompasses the totality of humanity.

Painting in Latin America has always been threatened by two types of frustration: provincialism and cosmopolitanism. The former is subjugation to things local, suffocation that comes from flying too low, mistaking the branches with the forest, transforming artistic creation in craftsmanship, folklore and the fabrication of quaint objects. The latter is a form of slavery to the universal, suffocation that comes from excessive imitation and lack of Invention, from losing itself In the impersonal, in that impetuous, whimsical inconstancy proffered by the large cultural centers. Few painters have managed to escape both dangers, creating a body of work scornful of both attitudes, whose originality has been forged from individual spiritual needs proudly assumed and a lucidity that uses everything ? one's own and others', the lasting and the ephemeral ? to make art. Szyszlo is one of these few.