THE ODD HARMONY OF UNCOMMON

© Yolanda Wood. 2001

Rubén moves loosely among different artistic environments. Setting upon painting has been a choice from the various techniques he masters which strike a balance along his career. Painting colour soberness has been inherited from engraving, previously practiced upon tint. There is not a trace of tropicalization or exoticism, terms usually used to labelled all what comes from the salty and sunny Caribbean islands.

The painter insists on the lack of hermetism or introspection in his work. He feels the pleasure of handling a pallet that evolves during the process towards the final piece. Precisely, joy lies on the narrow transit of the pallet. All colors could be present in the incipient canvas or cardboard. Then, the artist job begins until reaching the desired surface through the transit from the spontaneous shapes of the drawing first strokes to the pictorial quality and attributes he is interested in. Walking on the painting leads to discovery. There is no room for hazard or surprise; it is a transit along varied stations where, keeping his track, the artist can take different roads, it does not matter which, he will always arrive.

Definite color soberness, builds up another wondering zone during the emission–reception process because they stimulate certain opacity in the perceptual contact which tells how to penetrate and contemplate the perceptual painting. Just then, form and color find the highest point of attraction for creating a beauty notion alien to decoration. Calling of attention is inside each painting due to its pictorial materiality, its quality of performance and its subtle way of evoking figures kept out of any reality. Consequently, the pieces come and go around a relational symbolic game between what is true and false, rational and irrational; by representing and not. Within the truth of truthless.

Uncommon emerges from internal harmony as a form of significance since works create their own reference systems to talk about themselves. All metaphors are composed from the pictorial space and all possible anecdotes are subordinated to imagination. The artist has brought world and reality under art language.

The spectator will find, in the visual image of these pieces, the amazement of non–existence, but necessary to compose a more poetic vision of our very existence.