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Text published in: Jesús de Armas: drama y utopía (exhibition catalog), National Museum of Fine Arts, September 8 - November 12, 2018, pp. 4-11.
Fray Ramón Pané relates in his narratives [1] that the first inhabitants of these lands worshiped some wooden or stone figurines that they called cemies. Those idols and creation myths were recreated in the chronicles of the friar and in those of other curious travelers from the lands of the "New World." But it would take several centuries for some of the most accurate representations of the mythology of the mother cultures of this Island to appear in Cuban plastic arts. Demián Caracaracol, Atabeira and Irinri [2] burst forth with fierce strokes, made in charcoal, in the works of Jesus González de Armas (San Antonio de los Baños, 1934 - Paris, 2002). To this great of twentieth-century Cuban art we owe that revision of our Taino past.
Jesús de Armas almost completely disappeared from the Cuban artistic scene just at the time of greatest splendor and recognition of his work in Cuba. It seems that the curse that Cacibaquel [3] predicted on the arrival of the Spanish and the extermination of his people had also reached his work, whose dimension exceeded the limits of the strictly artistic. Jesús was a true anthropologist of the Cuban aboriginal culture to which he dedicated all his production in the fields of the plastic arts and was also a renovator of animation and caricature on the Island in the 1950s and 1960s.
He was born without an arm on September 8 - a date of deep fervor for being the day on which the patron saint of Cuba is celebrated - and to this he owed his middle name "de la Caridad", and perhaps some superstition. His physical anomaly and his self-taught training did not prevent him from becoming a publicist and animator for the Siboney Agency at the early age of 17, which, although for commercial purposes, during the time was one of the few places that sustained animation development. From these forays, his passion for cartoons and that extraordinary skill in drawing were born, at times with humorous overtones that accompanied him throughout his career.
Entre 1952 y 1954 alcanzó varios premios como caricaturista personal en el Salón de Humorismo de la Habana y ello le hizo ganar un notable reconocimientos en esta esfera. Jesús sobresalía como caricaturista por la agilidad de sus trazos y el acierto en la representación física y psicológica del retratado. Sus caricaturas tienen el desenfado y la osadía de esa tradición del humorismo gráfico cubano al que sin dudas revolucionó con la agudeza y síntesis que adquirieron progresivamente sus trabajos.
In 1957, he published Draw a smile , a 500-copy booklet filled with beautiful and picturesque caricatures made by De Armas and Margie Gavilán, artist and first wife. In light of this contemporaneity we would call this publication an artist's book; however, the caricatures on Cuban Issues made by Jesus owe more to the Landaluze of Types and customs of the Island of Cuba [4] . These drawings are an "affectionate satire of scenes in the public domain" [5]that from very fine lines and simple compositions describe with caustic subtlety certain everyday circumstances and characters: the ice cream seller or the lottery seller, the peasant who sleeps during his tasks in the field or the man who turns to look at a woman with a good figure .
The revolutionary triumph of 1959 reconfigured the artistic scene in Cuba in all areas of culture and under this new halo the Animation Studios of ICAIC were founded, whose first director and founder was Jesús De Armas. Even when he was very young, he had already achieved some prestige as a draftsman and this allowed him to take the reins of the department as an artistic leader. In addition to the experience gained at the Siboney studios, his first trip to the United States in 1955 to visit the studios of United Productions of America(UPA) would undoubtedly determine his work as an animator and the course of cartoons on the Island during the sixties. The meeting with some of the creators of the UPA and their postulates, who by then proposed a free animation, which did not replicate reality and with artistic overtones, were also the guidelines that he imprinted on the development of animation in Cuba. His first shorts under the title of "El maná" and "La Prensa Serious" are exhibited in 1960 and although they respond to ideological purposes, the virtuosity and simplicity of the design - made by Eduardo Muñoz Bachs - evokes a vanguard spirit and modern, very in tune with the style of the UPA. The progressive radicalization of an aesthetic language that advocated an animation that was detached from its educational purposes is evidenced inThe cowb oy (1962). In these cartoons that parody the figure of the cowboy, a character in North American films, "the design causes an intentional distortion that tries to plastically reflect the exaggerated camera shots of western films" [6] and the images acquire much more relevance than the narration , at times certainly confusing.
In 1963 Jesús traveled to Czechoslovakia to study at an important animation school in Prague, the Tricot Brother's Studio . Perhaps this proximity to a new source of inspiration for cartoons, his artistic anxiety and the complex cultural context of the sixties caused his works to acquire other stylistic and thematic concerns. Towards 1965 his animations became an anthropocentric reflection where man reveals himself in his greatest alienation. Pantomime of love no. 1 (1965) is the first of these introspective materials that together with Ostracism (1966) and A man and a goat(1966) are part of this radical change in his work. Animation becomes an intellectualized and highly experimental material that reflects the misunderstandings and fears of the human being. Including, he practically abandons color and proposes a sober drawing, in lines, somewhat close to graphic humor [7] .
His last production was La frontera (1967), a cartoon with an implausible plasticity recreated from geometric figures. This anime evokes the geopolitical conflicts of “the border and ends up turning the disputed land into the space of both opponents. However, even though it is less introspective than other of his materials, La frontera is also a trigger for artistic experimentation.
By the end of the 1960s, the spirit and euphoria of the revolutionary renovations of the early years had ceased and cultural policies were increasingly being defined. The artistic concerns of Jesús and that of other members of the Cartoon Department did not exactly fit a type of animation focused on educating the people. The incessant searches for aesthetics and for a language that would define cartoons in Cuba was not part of ICAIC's interests at that time. The rejection and misunderstanding of De Armas's cartoons led to his final departure from the institution in the same year, 1967, however the breath of his animations of an intimate nature, the strength and beauty of his drawing accompanied him throughout his career. in the plastic arts.
Pictographs, carbonates and hand mades : from Fernando Ortiz to Jesús de Armas
His interest in the Taino culture began in the 1970s when he embarked on a long journey to numerous caves and grottos on the island where remnants of the pictographs of the first Cuban aborigines are found. From those inquiries and his meticulous study his first creative proposals emerged. Like an ethnographer, Jesús de Armas toured all the archaeological sites, copying each of the symbols from the walls and studying their possible meanings. Between 1975 and 1977 he devoted his work almost entirely to comparing signs and analyzing their possible relationships. This research led to his book On the tracks of the white guayabo (Extramuros Editions) ,published in 1977, which constitutes a reference of interest within the studies about the siboney culture, with special emphasis on its pictographs.
His first creations from this stage as a painter [8] were extremely particular. He used earthy background colors to which he superimposed some pictographs such as spirals or triangles with dots inside. With these and other symbols he made compositions that simulated faces or evoked the interior walls of caves. Only few copies of these works are preserved, so any consideration of this period, which took place approximately between 1975 and 1979, is speculative. However, the images that we are still able to discover today show that during the period the pictographic signs were the central motif of the canvases.
The series Dynamics fishing of the circle painted in 1976 is a parenthesis within his production. In contrast to the dark canvases of earthy colors, these drawings are an explosion of color in which his facet as a humorous cartoonist is unleashed again. The series consists of drawings that describe the hunt for a geometric figure, the circle [9]. This sort of visual psychedelic in which small figures chase circles with tridents, seems to show that his cartoons have also reached those fabrics, since the works have the sensation of movement and rhythm that animation cinema possesses. On the other hand, it is possible to glimpse the marked influence of Roberto Matta's surrealist work. The characters with surrealist reminiscences and the enlivened nuances are also a consequence of the deep admiration he felt for the work of the Chilean, who was one of the primary references for the Cuban creator.
The most solid work during these years is undoubtedly his long series of pictographs (1979-1985). The delicate lines of these works, made with an almost absolute cleanliness of lines, are of a susceptible visual appeal. These drawings made on cardboard and canvas are not a copy or reproduction of the symbols of the aboriginal cultures, but an original appropriation, where each of the signs are reformulated in a new language of forms. Using only two inks, black and red [10], De Armas erects an unknown universe from which some references to the first cultures of our Island emanate, however, its essence is universalistic. Although some references to the Taino legends described by Pané and Fray Bartolomé de las Casas could be alluded to, certainly the spellings of Jesus hint at a magical-religious thought that exceeds any localism.
Both those works of a childlike nature, naive , as well as those with greater stylization in the forms have a conceptual solidity in which anthropology is superimposed on art. Long before José Bedia, Juan Francisco Elso and Ricardo Brey and another broad group of artists of the eighties, interested in cultural transversality, Jesús had been ahead of his time in his eagerness to “rediscover” the pre-Columbian universe of our island. His evident influence on Bedia's work of the early eighties is not fortuitous, in which he approached the Indo-American cultures, and even on his sober and linear drawing.
Jesús de Armas was a restless creator and this did not allow him stylistic stagnation. Late in the eighties he altered his usual delicate forms and the sharp lines made in charcoal burst into his works. The carbonates, as these works were baptized, make up another section within their creation. As of 1985 it is proposed not to approach the aboriginal world from the pictographs, but from the formulation of new and unpublished images that allude both to their rites and mythology, as well as to the conflicts of civilization. Not only did the use of charcoal - which he considered the inheritance of the first inhabitants - modified the creative molds of his painting and drawing; Also the titles, which rarely acquired significance in the pictographic works, now guide the contents and possible readings of the works.
Conquerors on horseback and creatures with erect phalluses are revealed in their greatest drama. The gestures of this expressionist iconography seem to contain the pain of the barbarism of colonialism in America. However, the hard line that almost breaks the surface of the paper or canvas is not only an expression of the suffering of an exterminated people, but also of a culture that is revealed. A mutual encounter (1990) describes that opposition of forces that results from the work of Jesús de Armas. The figure lying on the ground is devoured by a kind of demon-dog that inhales until its last breath, but the sex in both upright expresses that dominator-dominated polarity.
The cultural anthropophagy that almost destroyed our Taino roots came through the crucifix and the spear. There next to the bonfire in the Burning of Hatuey. From Anne Tronche to Wifredo Lam (1987) are the church and the crown. So it will not be fortuitous to find a thousand times in the drawings of Jesús de Armas the figure that laughs, mocks and with its totemic sex confronts a monk or a colonizer.
Even though the theme of conquest is undoubtedly an axis of inevitable magnetism during the eighties and nineties within his artistic work. The charcoals also rewrote the worldview of the Aboriginal world. In this way, hundreds of drawings are born related to white vomit, a magical ritual caused by hallucinogenic herbs that heals the body, and with the behique inhaling cohoba to communicate with the cemies. The drawings of a bird that creates the woman or the jicoteas being born from the back of a man are the first spellings that rescue that bygone past.
These impressive writings recounting civilizational conflicts and pre-Columbian idols were the works that achieved greater visibility on the Cuban and international artistic scene. In 1989 he was invited along with other prestigious international artists to make an engraving in tribute to the bicentennial of the French Revolution. A few years later his first personal exhibition was held at La Maison de l´Amérique Latine in Paris, Dessins et peintures: Neo-Taino Carbonates.This exhibition brought together some of his most recent works and works already exhibited in Cuba that shocked the public and French critics of the time due to the power of his drawing that reconfigured a massacred tradition and culture. From the very year of this exhibition, Jesús and his wife Gilda decided to start living in Paris, but their appearance on the Parisian art scene was practically nil until ten years later. After five hundred years of the "meeting of cultures", it seemed that interest in this fierce drawing that described the conflicts of colonization was beginning to decrease.
Plastic archeology
De Armas' first residence was the Montmartre district in the 18th arrondissement of the city of Paris. There he resumed his artistic explorations. A first period that lasted between 1992 and 1995 gave rise to a series entitled Mont-ma-terre, alluding to the French word that names the neighborhood where the artist lived and perhaps in a kind of nostalgia for his land now distant. This new group of works did not evade the Taino universe, but the new environment provoked the artist's attention on other objects and situations totally unknown until then. Thus were born some works in which the aboriginal cemíes were mixed with words in French. On the other hand, the sharp charcoal strokes were softened and his fabrics were filled with other colors and materials. This kind of collages gave off a certain dreamlike breath.
From 1995 to 2002 he became an anthropologist and archaeologist again, but now from the small town of Alfortville, on the outskirts of Paris, where he began his new research and lived until his death in 2002. His atelier was located there in the last years in France. Jesús de Armas is now experimenting with the material of the new times: plastic. This material completely invades his work and his Taíno signs are erected in new supports that derive both towards painting and sculpture. The meticulousness with which he creates new textures in the nylon that he molds with the heat of a rustic iron is implausible. In antithesis to his skill as a sculptor and his aesthetic concerns, the violence of his scathing and caustic drawing resurfaces.
Ten years after his arrival in Paris, De Armas is preparing a new exhibition for the Musée de la Mine in Saint-Étienne, in homage to the coal miners of that region and inaugurated a few days after his death on May 31, 2002 The show featured his recent creations made of black plastic fibers, in direct allusion to charcoal. He also incorporated dance, performance, installation. Along with the large sculptures and masks, by way of environement, one could hear the sound of plastic subjected to heat and strong twists to be able to reveal itself in large amorphous volumes.
In the footsteps of the white guava
Writing a text about an artist like Jesús González de Armas becomes a challenge in the few pages that this publication has. The relevance of his work and the renovations it introduced in the sphere of twentieth-century Cuban visual arts necessitate that we rethink the historiography of art in Cuba, in which de Armas is a great question mark. Although he has deserved the admiration and appreciation of his work by some researchers, it is still necessary to reposition it in the framework of Cuban art. Luckily, the rescue of historical memory allows saving great artists and those who had the privilege of knowing him, even today remember with admiration his work as a cartoonist, cartoonist, animator, anthropologist, writer.
Jesus was an intellectual, thinker, and fervent defender of our Aboriginal heritages to whose rescue he dedicated most of his life. He vehemently believed that he was a descendant of that race practically exterminated by the Spanish colonization. That passionate search and the force that he impressed on the images of pictographs, cemies and myths of the Taino culture make his work one of those necessary searches that place our culture beyond our Spanish past and our inevitable ties with Africa. After all, "Cuba" is the name with which those first inhabitants named this land.
Laura Arañado Arencibia
Curator
Note: You can find the artist's work on this site and a professional review of his artistic life.
[1] I am referring to the Relationship on the Antiquities of the Indians, the first and only direct source in relation to the mythology and customs of the first inhabitants of America.
[2] Names of Taino idols described by Fray Ramón Pané.
[3] Cacibaquel and Guanamacoel were two chiefs who, according to Pané, after a long fast to communicate with the Cemíes, foresaw the arrival of the colonizers and the slaughter of the aborigines.
[4] It was published in 1881 and is one of the most important books on 19th century Cuban manners, illustrated by the artist Víctor Patricio Landaluze.
[5] Joquín Texidor. "Prologue", in Draw yourself a smile. Editing Margie, De Armas, Havana, 1957, sp
[6] Roberto Cobas. Animation Cinema in Cuba: A retrospective look, in Dictionary of Ibero-American Cinema . Spain, Portugal and America . Madrid. 2011.
[7] It is possible that the relative abandonment of color in these cartoons has had to do with economic shortcomings in the country, as a large part of the stage's work was completed outside of Cuba. On the other hand, in 1966, De Armas began to collaborate assiduously with the newspaper Pa'lante, so it is not fortuitous that the harmony between the two manifestations has influenced each other.
[8] According to references by Gilda Alfonso - Cuban poet and second wife of the artist - in an obituary published in the Art Nexus magazine , (nº 46, October-December 2002, p.56) since the 1950s, Jesus had been developing some works pictorial that consisted of a kind of conceptual paintings in which he used one or two colors.
[9] The circle is one of the motifs with the greatest repetition found during his explorations and referenced in his book By the tracks of the white guayabo (1977).
[10] The ink used by the artist for his traces was acetyl red.
