Viewers standing before Carlos Luna’s
El Gran Mambo (2006,
oil on canvas, 144" X 192") will confront a very clear
order telling them what they must do. In Spanish, the
text reads “MIRAME SIEMPRE”; in English, that command
might be rendered literally as “LOOK AT ME ALWAYS,” but
more colloquially one would say “KEEP YOUR EYES ON ME.”
This command is written at the center of six contiguous
sections of extremely diverse images that make up a
painting on the scale of a large mural. Indeed, El
Gran Mambo is the summa of Luna’s work so
far. Technically, imagistically, and conceptually, the
painting fuses autobiography and artistic “stand,” and
it renders the artist’s particular aesthetic in a single
monumental ideogram. The figures and graphic characters
that appear in this work are found in Luna’s entire
oeuvre, and so this painting-mural might be seen as
the great curtain that opens to reveal the multifaceted
stage on which each of the artist’s individual paintings
is played out.
But
why “gran mambo” — Big Mambo — and not, for example,
“gran salsa”? Why one musical genre instead of another?
For those of us who read the titles of many of Luna’s
paintings and the texts that appear within them, it’s no
secret that Carlos Luna is more than a mere fan of Cuban
and Antillean music of the people. He is a connoisseur
and a scholar of African-origin music, and has been a
practitioner of that art — a bongo-player, to be precise
— since the age of nine, when he would sneak out of his
house in the tobacco town of San Luis, Cuba, in the
state of Pinar del Río, where he was born in 1969, and
go join the group that would be livening up the
festivities at a scruffy, noisy pick-up bar nearby.
The “mambo” that the unforgettable Pérez Prado
introduced to the world in 1951, after a decade of
musical experimentation — in his likewise unforgettable
recording of Qué rico el mambo — has a longer
tradition, and a nobler musical and folkloric ancestry,
than the salsa. “Mambo” is a word in the Bantu language
of Africa that means “conversation with the gods,” and
it points to the drums used in religious rituals. Thus,
in its references to music, history, and the worship of
the African gods, “mambo” is profoundly linked to Carlos
Luna’s Afro-Cuban aesthetic and world-view.
Formally, in terms of composition,
El Gran Mambo
has two horizontal bands, one above the other,
corresponding to the “Mírame” and the “Siempre,”
respectively, of the central inscription. The double
triptych’s scenes and motifs are arranged around a
vertical axis created by the central character in all of
Luna’s dramas — the Guajiro-Man (in a hat).
This figure appears twice, and is on a larger scale than
all the other figures in the painting.
Luna, who has admitted that the
Guajiro is one of
two main characters in his work (“He’s the true hero of
Cuban life”), recognizes thereby that there is another
figure of equal importance, the “Rooster-Man [or
Cock-Man], the magical, mythical-animal side of the Guajiro.”
In El Gran Mambo, the Rooster-Man appears upside
down in the lower half of the painting, apparently on
the losing side of the telephone call to the beautiful
young Picasso-esque woman who seems to emerge from the
other end of the receiver. Painted uniformly in blue,
the Guajiro-Man in his several versions and the
Rooster-Man, in the one, stand out as figures of mutable
iconic identity: here, blue underscores the figure’s
figurative and literal centrality as that color
contrasts with the ochres and black of the rest of the
composition.
But
only one icon, one sign, one motif, infinitely repeated
throughout the artist’s oeuvre, occupies the most
exalted hierarchical distinction. This figure appears as
a half-moon with nose and eyes, and it is the mark of
the sacred, the essential, upon Luna’s work. In it, we
recognize the figure of the orisha Elegguá, a god
in the Yoruba pantheon. Wifredo Lam, the artist best
known internationally in the first generation of Cuban
artists, said that he tended not to use a “precise
symbology,” although this sign for Elegguá often appears
in his paintings.
Elegguá
is a deity that mediates between men and nature, and in
El Gran Mambo he presides, alongside the Guajiro-Man,
over this apotheosis of Afro-Cuban imagery. Devil or
saint, Elegguá is an incorrigible peeping-tom who takes
on the role of witness and embodies the critical vision
of life central to the work of Carlos Luna. He is
present in melodramas involving romantic affairs gone
awry, in political attacks against Castro, and in the
farces starred in by the Guajiro-Man — three main
subjects constantly repeated, with variations,
throughout Luna’s work. The Sexy Lady, the Cayman (which
the outline of the island of Cuba is often said to
resemble), and the Horse complete the dramatis
personae of Luna’s theater. It is important to note
that the use of these signs is one of many revelations
of Luna’s profound and complicated positioning within
the rich tradition of twentieth- and twenty-first
century Cuban art; all of the signs are related to the
affirmation of national identity through Afro-Cuban
symbology.
To
comment responsibly on El Gran Mambo alone would
require more space than is available to this article in
its entirety, so let me just note that Cynthia MacMullin,
the curator of this exhibit, has not only used the title
of this one work for the entire exhibition but also
placed the work at the show’s center. The place of honor
given this work recognizes its importance as a synopsis
of Luna’s oeuvre thus far and underscores its
incomparable intrinsic merits as the capstone of his
career. The command at the center of Mírame Siempre,
probably taken from one of the many romantic ballads
that Luna has used in his seductions of the Sexy Lady —
ballads whose protagonists are the Guajiro-Man and the
Rooster-Man — is an order that can be interpreted as
referring to El Gran Mambo itself — Keep Your
Eyes on Me — where we find an entire anthology of
Luna’s work. Keep Your Eyes on Me, it seems to say, and
I will reveal my secrets and you, viewer, will more
fully enjoy the magic of Carlos Luna and his sidekick
Elegguá.
Luna had hardly reached legal age when he left Cuba for
Mexico, and in Puebla de los Ángeles he found a place to
sojourn for eleven years of his personal, spiritual, and
artistic wanderings. He had brought with him an
excellent education in the plastic arts (the Escuela de
Artes Plásticas, the Academia de San Alejandro, and the
Instituto Superior de Arte) and also brought along the
Guajiro-Man, who appears in Arbol Grande, Guajiro Yo
(Big Tree, Guajiro Me, 2001). This figure, in
collaboration with lyrics written by his friend Mardonia
Sintas (the nom de plume of Mexican poet
Francisco Hernández), took on new life and significance
first from Luna’s exile and then his new departure for
Miami in 2001. The two conspirators agreed on subjects
and then each worked independently. The result is
wonderful in its perfect coordination of word and image:
Ay Ceiba, Ceiba encendida / refugio de mi agonía / Tú
me salvaste la vida / con sangre de brujería / y hoy
canto mi despedida / con lágrimas de mi alegría.
“Ay, Ceiba, Ceiba
in flames,
/ shelter in my agony, / my life you saved / with blood
of sorcery / and today my farewell I sing / with tears
of happiness and joy”: This is the last of the five
strophes of the mano-a-mano between the poet and the
painter. This painting, which opens the exhibition, is a
moving tropos of departure in Luna’s life, a
symbol of what is left behind and what awaits in a life
of exile.
Es
tarde ya me voy
(“It’s late and I’m on my way”) is a line from a popular
song — the rider is on the way to meet his lover, who is
hidden in the thick undergrowth, at the extreme left of
the canvas, that the horse is entering. Elegguá is there
as a witness to this action, under the horse’s rear
hooves. That visual “thicket” — a cornucopia of phallic
symbols, scissors, knives, balloonlike breasts, eyes,
and countless other graphic motifs repeated throughout
Luna’s work — has a magical and ceremonial function. It
expresses not just the existential chaos that lies in
wait for us but also the artistic order and discipline
that governs its pictorial facture. This strategy of
calculated accumulation of widely diverse motifs and
signs, a metaphor of multiple signifieds, is also
expressive of horror vacui, that aesthetic
breathless panic associated with the Latin American
baroque.
But we should shun, so far as we can, labels that
explain very little and prevent us from keeping our
eyes on the individual work and its unique
intentions.
Covering the surface of the canvas with a swarming
“beehive” of expressive, narrative, descriptive, and
symbolic imagery has been one of the most prominent
features of Cuban painting since the days of its first
great practitioners, figures such as Amelia Peláez,
Mario Carreńo, René Portocarrero, and Wifredo Lam. Lam’s
La Jungla (The Jungle, 1943) marked the beginning
of an Afro-Cuban movement in painting that expressed an
unmistakably and riotously Afro-Cuban musical sound
through visual cacophony — the natural and the
supernatural joined in a uniquely Cuban ritual.
Misa
Negra (Black
Mass, 2005), Bruca Manigua (2004),
and War Hero (2003), despite their notable
historical distance and their subjects and styles so far
from the artists mentioned above, have in common with
them the use of the pictorial method of accumulation. In
El Gran Mambo, several patterns of geometrical
abstraction — the rectangle, the oval, the triangle —
articulate the underlying structure and both group and
differentiate the picture’s hundreds of motifs, signs,
objects, and vegetable and human forms. The integration
of the surface of the canvas into a coherent whole
results from a symbiotic relationship between
abstraction and figuration.
In
Misa Negra, the cock portrayed on the table-altar
is highlighted against this thronging mass, which is
executed in an exquisite tracery of yellow lines drawn
on a black background. Intertwined with the signs, and
in the margins of the painting, we see two skeletons, of
a man and a woman — he with erect member flowering into
a spur; her, at the left, expectantly awaiting his
arrival.
Death, present so often in Luna’s paintings, is
portrayed as a skeleton, like those created and
immortalized in drawings and prints by the great Mexican
master José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1931). Posada is one
of several Mexican masters who were the object of Luna’s
painstaking study during his long residence in Mexico.
(While there, Luna also met his wife, and his children
were born there. Claudia, his wife, is his muse, and a
figure that appears often in his works; she is also
sometimes identified as “Catalina.”)
In
Misa Negra, the cock is standing on a red
tablecloth, allusive of blood, and Elegguá serves as the
foundation of the entire work, floating on a sea of blue
and white waves. The cock is a national icon, pointing
back to the cocks painted by Marinao Rodríguez
(1912–199), another of the great pioneers of Cuban
painting, who used the figure to symbolize Cuba’s
self-affirmation, identity, and independence. The cock
is a central figure in many of Luna’s works, too, and it
is not hard to identify it as a metaphor for the “big
boss,” the man that gives orders, or would like to.
We
should remember, however, that the cock has a long
history as a symbol for male sexuality, and as such, its
significations are broad; they range from the metaphor
of seduction to an analogy with the rooster’s virility
and combativeness. Carlos Luna’s roosters play a number
of roles, and they allude to signifieds as varied as
symbols of national identity in the extremely ironic
portrayal in Misa Negra and references to the
author’s own younger days when he raised fighting-cocks
and took part in cockfights in his home town. Bum
Bata a Trancazo Limpio (Wham Bam, It’s Over, Man,
2006) is a painting of great playfulness and jocular
irony in which the Guajiro-Man and his cock run into a
Rooster-Man and his cock in the jungle. The
onomatopoetic “bum bata” and the rest of the title
included in the painting tell us just what sort of
encounter is about to result from this chance meeting.
The Rooster-Man goes in disguise when necessary: in
Aquel Incontrolable Deseo (That Uncontrollable
Desire), he wears a mask so no one will know that he was
the one who beheaded Fidel Castro with the knife,
dripping blood, that he’s carrying. In a diametrically
opposed humor we recognize the cock-figure in El
Rapto de Catalina (The Kidnapping of Catalina,
2001). Here, the Rooster-Man, the macho, Carlos Luna, is
literally carrying off 9under his arm) his Sexy Lady,
his “sweetheart,” his wife — lovingly kidnapping her and
taking her out of the city into a flowery meadow. In the
allegory Las Flores del Regreso (The Flowers of
Returning), the female character Catalina reappears,
this time lying on top of the cayman-island-Cuba,
another example of the metamorphoses that the characters
in Luna’s theater constantly undergo. Just as in Greek
theater a single actor might take on several roles by
simply changing his mask, so in Luna’s works the figures
take on several incarnations, both comic and tragic.
This vision of Luna’s memory and present life would not
be complete without the smell and taste of coffee. Café caliente Juliana (Hot Coffee, Juliana; the name
of Luna’s grandmother) and Café con con (a
rendering of “café con [leche, azucar, etc.]” into
percussive musical rhythms) are two vision-visits by the
Guajiro-Man, seated ceremonially in two very different
settings, and they convey cryptic messages I will leave
the viewer to decipher, in the light of the comments
I’ve made above. The steaming cup of coffee in the first
painting appeals to our olfactory memory, and the
composition — part real, part fantastic (the man
floating above Juliana) — transports to a world of
dreams. Café con con leche, as the lettering
complementing the figuration reads, needs, I think, no
explanation, especially when one considers the three
marvelous coffee-pots in the painting’s left margin.
Keep
your eyes on me.
That is the artist’s command, and we see it mirrored in
the hundreds of eyes that appear in his paintings — such
as the enormous eye in El Gran Mambo that emerges
from the formal composition and gives geometric
coherence to the work, and that also acts as a key to
the interpretation of its iconography, not to mention
the hundreds, perhaps thousands, that throng the
vegetable and animal metamorphoses in the backgrounds of
his paintings.
To
say that Carlos Luna’s work is a grand comedy in which
playfulness, irony, sarcasm, and caricature — the “pop”
aspect of his painting — immediately seduce viewers and
draw them in, is to recognize just one side of the coin.
His “gran mambo,” his grand theater, could not exist
without the tragedy and pain of the political exile
which is the blood that gives life to his masterful mise-en-scčne. The compact image, simple or complex,
familiar, political or mythical, is governed by two
ordering principles of exceptional virtuosity: the line,
the drawing, which produces outlines of absolute
descriptive and expressive clarity; and a pictorial
color-sense that is present both in his use of brownish
hues — yellowish, reddish, black-tinged — and in his
kaleidoscopic array of intense tones.
Last — but far from least, for it is of capital
importance in his art, his iconographic and imaginative
thinking — sexuality is always present in all its rich
range of generative force, ethnic characterization, and
Afro-Antillean tradition, and as an instrument of
conquest in love and — the other side — the machismo
that is endemic to Latin cultures. The “kingdom of the
phallus” is very much a part of Luna’s visual
stage-machinery. Penises and balloon-breasts are a
constant motif, like a musical leit-motif
repeated over and over, and their iconographic force
characterizes the personages in an infinite variety of
forms and techniques. It goes without saying that sexual
organs have been icons of Cuban art since Lam gave them
the synoptic powers of passion and ethnicity, and they
have come to be used in the work of a veritable Pleiades
of contemporary Cuban artists. But the sexuality that
identifies the loving conquest of a woman may also
become the negative feature of the abusive, cynical
macho. Both commentaries are eloquently articulated by
Luna in his flying penises, sometimes embodied in the
rooster, or cock, in the Guajiro-Man and the
Rooster-Man, with the help, naturally, of the woman, the
Sexy Lady.
El
Gran Mambo is
an expression of profound emotions and ideas, emotions
and ideas that were also an essential part of the
musical ritual of the original Bantu mambo.
Communication with the primordial gods, the search for
individual and collective identity, was the goal of that
ceremony. Luna, too, aspires to communicate with the
gods.
San Juan, PR September
3, 2007
Translated by Andrew
Hurley
