A TRILOGY OF POLYSYNTHESIS IN CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN: EDOUARD DUVAL CARRIE, JOSE BEDIA AND JOSE GARCIA-CORDERO.
Contemporary Caribbean artists consciously reinvent and reassess themselves from the primordial manifestations of their people, exposed to the avant-garde at a global level, they create their own art, authentic, capable of causing us to look inward and to establish the transcendence of our difference, even through the most abstract or minimalist symbolic elaboration of their own ethno-genetic "unidiversity" of the same self-defining cultural contradictions …
Those of José Garcia Cordero (1951), Edouard Duval-Carrié (1954) and José Bedia (1959) are three visual universes capable of allowing a “spectroscopic” reading of the contemporary Caribbean polysynthesis. It is a matter of three auto-significant esthetic proposals ideologically linked, not only through some objective contents in which underlie traditional imagery sources or through some conceptual resolutions that proclaim their vital transmutation of the more radical poetics of the western artistic modernism, without forgetting the "West Indian surrealism" and the reflexive post-expressionism that, at first instance, especially mark each one of their poly-phase symbolic creations.
The recent productions of Duval Carrie, Garcia Cordero and Bedia bring us face to face with three eminently reflexive and ethical creative methods. Their respective metaphorical repertoires explode and dialogue as a mirror of a singular sensibility and a single compromisingly identifying discourse. Rebellious, clear, mystical, thaumaturgies of dreams and vigil … A playful-speculative temperament distinguishes and links in a crystalline and enigmatic way these three creators and carries them to materialize their images from their particular transmutations and appreciation of the ancient symbols, as well as from their intimate visions of the chaotic postmodernist rituals, the feel for the land, the escape-migration and return-, the magic, the memory, the sociopolitical absurdities and the amazing daily routine of the insular reality.
Amable Lopez Melendez, AICA/ADCA
Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
English translation by Sandy Garcia
EDOUARD DUVAL-CARRIE
As a result of his exhibit "Life in North Caribbean" (2009), presented by the Lyle O. Reitzel Gallery in Santo Domingo, we have been able to appreciate the high levels of effectiveness and symbolic polyvalency that distinguish the recent work of Edouard Duval Carrié. Works like "Anguished Man", "Blue Spirit", "Coral Head Mutant", "Dead Radiant Islanders", "Moonlight II", "Swamp Beasts", "Rescue" and “Radiant Islanders" (2007), stand like precarious territories of amazement. Marine blue cartographies. Vegetable polychromy, magnetic and progressive…
Other axial works of the same series: "Triptych Makandal", " Floating Ile ", "Lava-Dandy", "Mutilated Mutant", "Tantric Siren", "Reflecting Toussaint Yellow", Vigilant City", "Yellow Tainted Lady" and "Yellow Tainted Man" (2008), operate as images of an ardent and risky alchemy. Shadow grisailles. Landscapes and sketches as astral promises. These works are the result of an especially intense and emotional creative process. Pristine and unknown super-reality. Indescribable tropology. Golden and reactive transparencies. Fascinating spectroscopy of a journey towards enigma. A burning game of Duval Carrié's sensibilities and imagination materialized from a splendid return toward the oasis of memory, magic and the essential signs of the polysynthesis in the contemporary Caribbean.
…In these works, Duval Carrié shows mastery in execution and arrives at the limits of preciousness. He uses different techniques, materials and expressive resources: oil, acrylic, fabric, synthetic resins, wood and a surprising diversity of extra-pictorial elements. The frame becomes an enriching element, amplifying a fundamental process in the Haitian popular artistic tradition. The decorative motifs are "key" at the moment of noticing the wealth or image potential of the facade.
Thus, Edouard Duval-Carrié, José Bedia and José Garcia Cordero, constitute a trilogy that is without doubt surprising and three expressions that are different and complementary of the formal severity, of the amazing synthesis of different signs, symbols, forms, poetics and esthetic practices that proclaim the renewal and ascendancy of contemporary Latin-American and Caribbean art. And, precisely, that is one of the reasons why, in the last decades, their work is an essential part of important private and public collections in the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe and the United States.
Amable Lopez Melendez, AICA/ADCA
Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
English translation by Sandy Garcia
JOSE GARCIA-CORDERO
In his pictorial production of the last decade, José Garcia-Cordero undertakes an extraordinary diversity of themes related to culture, ecological crimes and the sociopolitical contradictions in the contemporary Caribbean. In these paintings, subversive images "appear"; "self-portraits", beasts and terrifying beings; transfigurations and sinister shadows, causing or "demanding" the attentive glance and the awakened conscience of the spectator.
In works of an appallingly attractive force as the ones titled "Erosion" (1998), "Lawsuit-Bipolar Dog or the Return of the Beast" (2007), "Envy" (2007), "Crucifixion I" (2007), "Low Green Forest" (2009); "Little Eyes" (2008); "Garcia Márquez’s Dreams II" (2009); "Landscape with dogs" (2004-2008); "Low dry Forest-Desiderio-" (2009); "Clear Marine" (2008); "Lonely Palm"; "Montecristi’s Trunk” and "Auvergne Landscape" (2009), these last from the series "Post-Publicity Landscapes", Garcia-Cordero undertakes an extraordinary diversity of themes thoughtfully connected to the socio-cultural and political complexity in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Garcia Cordero is brilliantly ironic about the psychohistory of a society frantically engrossed in consumerism, hedonism, violence, absurdity, double standards, fear, environmental depredation, and corruption. In these and in other symbolic reactions of an unhinged metaphorical recourse, "landscapes" and moving illusions are placed; scorched territories and trees; nocturnal forests burning in a red blaze; "destructive" spaces of reason that operate as painful memory, "live natures" or terrible incarnations of our psychosocial otherness and ontological devastations.
JOSE BEDIA
Thaumaturgist of a specialized creative practice, in search of a radical imagery of the polysynthesis, more than a symbolic exponent of the Latin-American postmodern art, José Bedia proceeds in the manner of the "new seers": student of the primordial spiritual energies, of multicultural-Amerindian, African, European and Afro-Caribbean symbols and values, transformer of “contaminated” signs and iconographies, he also avails himself of the resources of post expressionist abstraction, but many times his expressive resources stem from reality. In the last ten years, Bedia's work exhibits a thematic openness in which converge the traces of the cosmic community, the mythologies and daily rites, as well as the global political and biotechnological "air" that he has come to breathe.
In a series of representative pictorial works of this time and belonging to his exhibition "Makishi Nkishi" (Lyle O. Reitzel Gallery, Santo Domingo, 2009), such as "Loango Nkishi" (2007); "Mwendumba" (2008), "Chibinda Mutata" (2008), "Ngulu Makishi" (2008), "Kifwebe" (2008), "Samasengo" (2008) and "Feeling Strong" (2008), Bedia not only enters in the primordial and living sources of the African-American spirituality, but deepens into the same resistance of the magical-mythological roots that burn in the contemporary Caribbean conscience.
In these works, the treatment of form, color, matter and space, forces us to look at the esthetic act less as pleasant reality, and more as a unique form of thought through which are revealed the respect and the process of revivification that the ancient sign acquires in his artistic practice of insuperable contemporary spirit…Here, José Bedia continues "deciphering" the everyday and metaphysical mysteries of existence; contrasting splendidly the deep spiritual and cultural sediment of the peoples from the Caribbean and inserting himself with masterly precision in his "trip to the origins" : toward the warped spirals of our self-defining polysynthesis.
Amable Lopez Melendez, AICA/ADCA
Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
English translation by Sandy Garcia
JOSE GARCIA-CORDERO
In his pictorial production of the last decade, José Garcia-Cordero undertakes an extraordinary diversity of themes related to culture, ecological crimes and the sociopolitical contradictions in the contemporary Caribbean. In these paintings, subversive images "appear"; "self-portraits", beasts and terrifying beings; transfigurations and sinister shadows, causing or "demanding" the attentive glance and the awakened conscience of the spectator.
In works of an appallingly attractive force as the ones titled "Erosion" (1998), "Lawsuit-Bipolar Dog or the Return of the Beast" (2007), "Envy" (2007), "Crucifixion I" (2007), "Low Green Forest" (2009); "Little Eyes" (2008); "Garcia Márquez’s Dreams II" (2009); "Landscape with dogs" (2004-2008); "Low dry Forest-Desiderio-" (2009); "Clear Marine" (2008); "Lonely Palm"; "Montecristi’s Trunk” and "Auvergne Landscape" (2009), these last from the series "Post-Publicity Landscapes", Garcia-Cordero undertakes an extraordinary diversity of themes thoughtfully connected to the socio-cultural and political complexity in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Garcia Cordero is brilliantly ironic about the psychohistory of a society frantically engrossed in consumerism, hedonism, violence, absurdity, double standards, fear, environmental depredation, and corruption. In these and in other symbolic reactions of an unhinged metaphorical recourse, "landscapes" and moving illusions are placed; scorched territories and trees; nocturnal forests burning in a red blaze; "destructive" spaces of reason that operate as painful memory, "live natures" or terrible incarnations of our psychosocial otherness and ontological devastations.
Amable Lopez Melendez, AICA/ADCA
Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
English translation by Sandy Garcia