Reynerio Tamayo: SATELLITE LESSONS

Flashing its monochromatic character, and like if it’s all about pictures, Reyneiro Tamayo’s recent work plays to be a landscape, schemes it as fiction. The artist offers viewers upsetting visions in which he lampoons the geometry as part of his study on land surface. With those views, he composes a narrative text that goes beyond the scientific interpretation of geography, in favor of the humanism drawn up by the bodies of his metaphors that take from art, the history and multiple present matters, embodying mythical figures and multiple belligerences, after being disguised as peninsula, city, bay, beach or isle, and play the leading roles in the segments of his Ojo satelital series.

These fantasies of visual impact created by Tamayo and put together to make up the La tierra comprometida exhibition, turned out to be a sort of enigmatic sentences, a particular warning related to more than one awkward situation to be faced by the contemporary world. Through this formal rewriting of pop art implicit in his work, starting with the appropriation of a so-common language like Google Earth, a replica of that global and visual culture that we are presently part of and, at the same time reflecting on universal matters, he recycles codes just as he efficiently communicates his ideas.

When facing this series of paintings, you can distinguish his connection with pop art as well as a particular interest in the mass media, similar to that trend, but from an updated approach to these elements after their digital evolution. He takes into account the global impact of an unprecedented mass communication: multiple universes within easy reach thanks to the Internet and other computer programs, quickly-accessible worlds from anywhere and anytime through the development achieved by mobile telephones, guides including GPS, besides the power of social networks, presently defined as the fifth power. His is an outlook born from these increasingly-expanded realities, with special connectivity options and access to the information. So, Tamayo takes images, just like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg did, among others. Images representing truthfulness, a world come true through those visualizations that are put on the map by Google. Nevertheless, when taking that appearance (by recycling it), he doesn’t bet on its depletion, but blows new senses and ideological commitment in, just like what happened back in the 1970s with Valencian artists from Equipo Cronica.

The absurd and satire included in Tamayo’s poetics –from the recycling, the quote and parody of art history– drew, along with the joking, a singular caricature of society, upon defining types and customs, as part of his approach to the paradoxes of our reality or when, with the same openness and irreverence aimed his comments on the inflexibility, dogma and ineffectiveness. But since his joking is connected to the same feature, defined as inherent to the social psychology of Cubans, it’s essential to recognize that Cubans’ psychology and the sense of humor have been modified by history, an implicit reality in the reality of Tamayo’s work and other artists. In his case, the multiform expression and ascendant evolution illustrate the transit from that “ironic and skeptical jocularity” –benign form of joking according to the reflection of Jorge Mañach a result of our disposition to the lightness and independence– to most refined ways of humor, which can be identified in his drawings, ceramics, posters, watercolors, paintings and installations. His heuristic intentionality was clarified after having gone beyond the predictable satiric, giving free reins to an explosive irony, sometimes close to sarcasm, in that review of the contemporary universe that is lampooned over and over without the presence of any smile; in that pastiche that characterizes its most recent production.

The ascendency that has marked Reynerio Tamayo’s discourse during the last five years coincided with his critical urgency. His habitual witticisms and divertissements have given way to existential concerns and matters of collective and universal interest. The design, synthesis and sobriety pay tribute to that upon (re)creating the language of Internet, recognizing particular activism in the global standardization, in the same replica he uses to create his landscapes; aerial views that simulate impressions of the world that have escaped from Google Earth.

These “geo-space” reports began in 2007, in the heat of collective project Cosmos. During the presentation at Galeria Habana, Tamayo placed the actions of Cubans in the space (Taxi sobre asteroide, Mensaje en una botella, Primeros pasos en Marte andAstronauta). Those “conquerors” –stars of his sidereal fantasies– were his look at the future, responding to a curatorial line that called together notions on future from different urban visions in dialogue with our context. Focused on that distance, looking at the Earth entailed a new formal route and a change in the management of humor through Sexos opuestos. The weight of the geopolitical conflict between Cuba and the United States was turned into an erotic metaphor after bringing their geographies near: Havana with its bay and the peninsula of Florida synthesized opposed interests when the seaport channel’s female spirit tried to be taken by the peñíscola. The carnal approximation and analogy summarized more than one yearning. The title reinforced the disagreement and definition as male or female of opposite parts, after having chosen actors capable of meaning, more than a precise age of the conflict, an ancient and historic yearning for possession, as well as the desire of surpassing physical and spiritual distances.

In 2008, Tamayo put together in his solo exhibition Magma mía!!!, his sharp look on the context (En el ojo del huracan), and the questioning to the progress of men at planetary scale. He held our specie responsible for that series of tensions presently faced by mankind: lack of safety on the streets, violence, terrorism, wars and environmental crisis… and, upon including La manzana mordida and Habana profunda, he drew a strategy according to his new interests: the appropriation of the satellite language. In the first one, the 9/11 terrorist act was a bite to Manhattan, while in the second piece, a heart was represented by Havana’s bay, embodying the intimate affection –sometimes obsessive– of Cubans (in and out the isle) for their capital. Magma mía!!!, reflected his discursive maturity, pointed out theme and conceptual changes, and continuity to the satellite views, which like “visual sentences” are developed in a recent work.

The fantasies that made up La tierra comprometida, his most recent solo exhibition, talked to that urban animal presently represented by mankind. The simulation was created from cities that don’t actually exist, scheming geography far away from culture and history. Located like puzzles, his hybrids were visions, landscapes that tackled global and local matters: the survival of the planet as the home of all of us, the effects of the current world order, the threat of war and some aspects of Cuban reality.

With his return to La Gioconda, Tamayo positioned his reverence to the creation, first in Laguna interior, title that defined as such that fascinating condition of Venice, reproducing its physical layout with hotels taken from Varadero so as to take the most famous portrait in history out of a water nest. On the other hand, Peninsula, represented the emblematic icon created by Leonardo da Vinci, like photographic negative of urban structures in Florence, cradle of the Renaissance and important historic, artistic and economic center.

El ultimo dia de Jackson Pollockis a tribute to abstraction and, particularly, to one of his most significant referents. He took from Google a picture of the house that belonged to Pollok and combined it with a singular interpretation of the car accident that put an end to the life of the artist in 1956. He placed a simulation of the map to the right, and the red color impacted the left side with splashes (just like blood over a windshield) a space with dynamism and vitality. Along with this, the dripping, grey aluminum, reminded one of Pollok’s most significant moments as the main maker of abstract expressionism, and the surface was an all-over, synthesis of his personality, gestural behavior and emotiveness.

The idea ofHarakiri came up from his admiration for Japanese culture, but in the dramatic intensity of ritual suicide (belonging to samurais’ tradition and codes), you could feel a symbolic reading of Japan after the devastating earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. In the stage, imbued with the spirit of ancient xylography, the character’s kimono showed Tokyo’s financial center, while the suicide’s blood, in graphic splashes, was the Japanese archipelago reaching a background similar to the painting on folding screens. The circumstantial joined: the praise to the country, the consternation due to the misfortune of its inhabitants, with the possibility of having all that symbolism interpreted as censure to the greed and panic felt in the stock market and markets in that moment, due to the global impact of the catastrophic event in one of the main economies of the planet.

For that collection that was conceived as La tierra comprometida, national matters were focused on Habana, accompanied by Mito y realidad andNostalgia. With Habana they merged into a metropolis and bay body. The role played by both of them in the history of the nation was recognized: political meaning, economic weight, distinction on identity and culture. The bay was turned, after being that so-germinative breach, into female reproductive organ, adding up elements that rounded up other concepts related to a female metropolis, seductive lady, and mother. The ships looked for her as male sexual cells. Her round –just like tight urban grid chosen to represent her– reproduced that complex and supersaturate metropolitan beat that includes us. In Nostalgia, Cuba passed as a cloudy band over Florida, close to Miami –destination of different migration waves–, distinguishing that yearning (love/obsession) of Cuban migration for the Isle. On the other hand, Mito y realidad reproduced the outlines of the legendary guerrilla that was photographed by Korda in 1960, by using hotels in Varadero. Upon merging that “paradise” of leisure and entertainment with the silhouette of Che’s photography, Tamayo returned to the ideology instilled in generations. So, the height of the incorruptible Guevara, established a dialogue with economic realities that fall far from his altruism and disinterest, after the experience lived by the artist during the 1990s, when he discovered his iconic figure taken as souvenir merchandise.

Tamayo’s interest in the fate of mankind took him to define with La playa, a mouth willing to eat everything. It expressed that struggle of development/underdevelopment duality as appetite, the violence caused by the interaction among small nations and economies and the first-world countries, the regional related to the big metropolis, while it illustrated that local voice swallowed by the global concert. On the other hand, Bombardero, with its shadow game, represented an ill omen, similar to the one projected over the land by the bird of prey. His metallic bird with a military aircraft body (similar to the B-52F), anchored in the present a future of destruction that can be perceived in the series of tensions that mark the pulse of our time.

It was that very universe, tormented by wars, environmental crisis and human immoderation, the one taken by Tamayo and turned into the star of the comic used as the epilogue of the exhibition. The jump to the space represented by La casa, in the middle of the deep thoughts of Ojo satelital series, called the attention on planet Earth, our home. So, the entire collection worked as maxim and, that might be the reason why Tamayo’s La isla de los vivos remade that place offered by Arnold Böcklin in La isla de los muertos, where the souls were guided by Caronte to the Hades. The interior of that insula, which wasn’t discovered by the boatman in Böcklin’s series, was showcased there through an aerial view as the paradise of comfort, becoming the moral of fantasies gathered in Galeria Habana under the title La tierra comprometida. If paradise turns out to be that promise after death, it would be encouraging to obtain so much beauty in a healthy environment, not in the hell offered by men as predators.

The main motive of Tamayo’s reflection route is the commitment with a sustainable world, and his strategy, conceived as a result of the widening of information consumption area reached by the human society, can’t hide his own fascination in that sense, or the preference for the resulting imaginary. Nevertheless, the frightening dependence of mankind for computers sententiously tries to undress us. He’s worried about that substitute reality that grows alone, in spite of being a socialization way. He is afraid of the shipwrecked persons we are –just as Stefania Mosca defined us– in the poisoned sea of information.

Reynerio Tamayo has given more than one sense to his visions, to those bodies carved by staging and collage, hybrids that bring about humor. Within the panorama he has offered since 2007 with Ojo satelital series, he has (re)created, through the parody, his impressions on the world (which is also the world of mass communication). That’s how his versions, outlined by the simulation, are just replicas, mirages. His game, however, is full of lessons, and it’s important to be aware of that, so when someone believes that controls everything, that someone shouldn’t been deceived believing to be the eyes of God.