A Croatian immigrant opens a philosophy book by Haberma in Huesca, a small town in northern Spain. Without wind, the letters escape from the pages. Like flocks of peregrine butterflies traveling across the sea, the rain and salt erase their color and meaning, but not their essence.
After a long journey of thousands of kilometers, they rest exhausted on a white canvas, like a shroud, by the Uruguayan artist Fernando Varela, who has lived in the Dominican Republic for many years, to be preserved eternally in varnish.
Fernando Varela, in the hot Caribbean evening on his terrace-studio in Santo Domingo, reads with a slight gesture of disdain the old text The Comedy of Art by Baudrillard, more concerned with the shapes drawn by the clouds in the puddles created by the last storm than with the letters of the article.
Fernando Varela is against aesthetic simulation and against an art that we consume only visually. With his painting, he seems to be trying to nullify Baudrillard's thesis in his famous text, already mentioned, and considers that art still has a vital function, that the desire for illusion can be recovered. In contrast to the French philosopher, who, incited by much of the banality generated by postmodernism, considers that the duplicity of contemporary art lies in "claiming nullity, the absence of meaning, senselessness, seeking nullity when one is already null," Varela is not only alien to this thought, but also counter-armed. Varela claims art as an existential whole, which marks his life, which is, rather than the absence of meaning, the essence of meaning, which has meaning, and which is vital, and seeks thought when it is already thought. There is no uncertainty in his discourse; no importance is given to what lacks it, it does not deceive, and it is certainly not a product for just any consumer.
Why do I begin with these denials based on an old text from 1966? Because it seems unbelievable that, even after all these years, he's still relevant when it comes to challenging an art that, through disguises, follows the same principles Braudillard denounced. What is the purist Varela still doing immersed in this consumerist world, corrupted by fashion? Simply constituting himself an island, like the one he lives on physically, oblivious to everything, building an island within another.
Varela seems immersed in a painting of the limit, and that limit is a borderland that questions languages and erases categories. Varela approaches painting with the conceptual sense of an installation; even the theoretical aspect is as dense, if not more so, in the two-dimensional than in the three-dimensional. And on the other hand, the installation demands the same aesthetic rigor and order as painting.
Within these border parameters, the relationship with Eugenio Trias is obligatory. They know and recognize each other. The philosopher has written about the painter, and the painter has devotedly read the philosopher. Both are proponents of the need for art to engage in critical reflection of a moral nature and for a connection between ethics and aesthetics. The spiritual dimension of the human condition is also part of their premises, and its reflection in their works is visually and conceptually perceptible. We are speaking of religiosity and transcendence, whatever it may be, within or outside of dogma. Varela even engages in what Trías calls "the radicalization of the spiritual dimension of art," and accompanies other great artists on this path, such as, according to the examples of the philosopher I share: Stockhausen, Masiaen, Le Corbusier, Anthony Caro, and José Ángel Valente.
From the materialization of feelings and their slippery consequences, passion emerges as the settlement of a feeling that departs from the prevailing technological coldness and reconstructs a disaffected landscape in which art moved during postmodernism and its final years. The turning point in the order of values that the 20th century represented was already predetermined in Varela's work, which already possessed a pre-catastrophic point of illumination, exemplified by the installation he created at the Spanish Cultural Center in Santo Domingo in 1999, entitled The Magic of Fear. In the introductory text, I wrote: "Fear is fertile; fear lies on the border between memory and invention."
For both, the importance of the symbol is fundamental, as is the need to integrate that symbol, radically reconstructed, into "aesthetic reflection." In specific works by some artists, and in many by Varela, there is something that Trías calls a "symbolic supplement" that is capable of exposing specific aspects of our common condition (human or inhuman). Varela has made paintings in the form of a cross, which is the symbol's logo, but beyond the obviousness, there is a symbolic charge, more or less hidden in all his work, that gives it emblematic properties.
In that sea of letters composed of the visible or recognizable elements of Varela's paintings, literature, philosophy, music, religion, poetry... navigate. It is a painting without genres. We do not see any glimpse, neither from the bow nor from the stern, nor by climbing the mast, of the vindictive genres used in contemporary art today, since Varela is not a woman, so political feminism does not exist in her work, nor is she gay, so she also lacks a sensed sexual transgression, nor is she black, so artistic anti-racism is absent from her work, nor ethnicity from a developing country with a proposal of poor and local materials... What is there in Varela's art, that as a concept makes it current without being part of the theoretical and vindictive genres of current art, I think that mainly there is a distance from a philosopher in the practical conception of painting. And this leads us to consider other examples and relationships, which we'll see later, and which perfectly situate him in a turn-of-the-century borderland, very well served in terms of the conceptual and visual aspects of his work. His work doesn't situate me in the Caribbean, nor in his native Uruguay, although, in a certain constructive order, in that seemingly infinite cosmos that is his alphabet, and the use of grays, off-white tones, and beige evoke, in a very tangential way, the universe of Torres García. But this is a minimal reference, which in police terms would be an unfounded clue and of no weight in the trial. The antecedents of the case must be sought in other geographies outside of where the painting takes place.
When I delve into Varela's world, I clearly see a serene perspective on the confusions and reiterations of art at this turn of the century. Writing this article, with my focus on his works, I was drawn to reread Joseph Casall's extremely interesting essay, "Viennese Affinities, Subject, Language, and Art," in which the author pairs artists and writers who were the protagonists of the Viennese Renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's curious how, at the turn of the century, very similar situations are being raised and others are being called for. We can see authors reactive to the end of the century, but steeped in its atmosphere, like Weininger and Kraus. Mauther and Hofmannschal represent crisis as the limit of silence, and in the latter's case, the loss of innocence. Wittgenstein and Musil question certainties held inviolate in the previous century... It seems paradoxical that the work of a Uruguayan-Dominican painter in the 21st century leads me to reread an essay on the turn of the century in the Vienna group and that I even agree with the author, pairing, as I am doing in this text, an artist with a philosopher. But it is not so strange; Fernando Varela is a cultured and reflective artist; his references are nourished more by other intellectual fields than by art history itself, which is why the combination of philosophy with painting, with religion, with music, is inherent to his work, and the fin-de-siècle character that is present in his painting is also a property of his work.
So, what does Fernando Varela have that's Caribbean and South American? Initially, there's no cliché; we don't see strident colors or strong contrasts, or the presence of blinding light, or symbols from pre-Hispanic cultures, or typical characters, or a denunciation of an unequal and unjust society, or expressionism, or surrealism, or magic... Yes, there is magic, but in the sense that Trías writes about Varela: "Magic is the art of acquiring mastery over the macro. Magic means power... Magic is the very evidence of the power that intelligence confers on the human being. And this becomes what it is, an object in which the maximum power is encrypted: that which is inaccessible to man himself." He is not an artist, as we have said, who draws on the immediate exterior, but rather on an interior composed of his own references that are transformed into influences.
Varela's works are beautiful in themselves, when we are in doubt about whether beauty can be maintained in the 21st century in classical terms as a product of harmony, in a field in which the concept of the world was totalitarian and not fragmentary, as globalization has made evident in apparent contradiction, now the concept of beauty would be the consequence of the tensions between that fragmentary world. Varela does not oppose the beautiful and the sinister in his work, as in which that subtle and non-negotiable ambiguity is disturbed in which, and only in which, beauty can be established. Beauty in Varela's works is situated in another type of ambiguity, on the one hand aesthetic, which is established between the image and its dissolution, between existence and disappearance, between the concrete and the indefinite; and on the other hand, of meaning in which understanding must be sought at the limits of incomprehension. There is nothing sinister in the opposite, if there can be mystery, but it is the same in both the light and dark parts of his thought and his work.
If the minimal art of the sixties made the viewer think by confronting them with objects that didn't tell the whole story, objects that provoked a confrontation with themselves, inducing insecurity, incomprehension, and ultimately loneliness; as the years passed and as viewers became adults thanks to accumulated experience, Varela gave minimalism another twist, introducing parts of the narrative into his work that transform this confrontation with oneself, now overcome, into a challenge between the viewer and their most transcendental self, which has to do with superiority or, as Trías says: "that supreme Lord (of life, of existence) is Death. Death is the presence that awakens intelligence. And that awakening is brought forward and anticipated by fear. We are intelligent by virtue of that dark feeling that accompanies us throughout our life's adventure." And I would add, we are religious thanks to or as a consequence of the existence of death.
Varela's paintings are cemeteries of letters. Those letters that formed part of great epic poems, love poems, mad biographies, travel stories, and profound essays that sought to answer everything lie forever on the artist's canvases. But these canvases await a resurrection; they are magmas of letters, great amoebas that presage a future. In other earlier paintings by Varela, the letters were within an oval shape, the origin of life. So there is hope, there are possibilities for renewal.
Letters have been part of art since its origin, Egyptian art is accompanied by its signs, hybrids between image and letter called hieroglyphics, Roman and early Christian mosaics have their letters that identify the personal or warn Cave Canem, at the beginning of the 20th century cubists and futurists include the letter as part of the composition apparently without any meaning, as objects but at the end of the last century, the letter takes over the light with Francés Torres or is captured in a joke as with Richard Prince, or invades calligraphic walls as in conceptual artists ... In Varela there is a clear concept of the lack of writing as the origin of a language, which marks the differences, an awareness of our ignorance, which has given us globalization in which we see people who occupy our territories and we do not understand their language, so their physical proximity distances us from understanding their thought. We've lost the security that comes with understanding. Our grandparents didn't need to know languages; they didn't move beyond their perfectly recognizable circle. Now, those circles have been invaded by incomprehension...
If, as Pierre Bourdeau says, "the ideal of the 'pure' perception of the work of art as a work of art is the product of a long process of 'purification' that begins from the moment the work of art is stripped of its magical or religious functions..." Varela's works would not be pure art. Fortunately, this concept has lost its validity, since, as we have said, the stripping that occurred to the maximum with Minimalism has been enriched by a procedure contrary to stripping, which consists of adding to a clean aesthetic concept some added content, in this case philosophical and musical, that not only enrich but also become part of the plastic image itself. Contrary to this stripping, Varela constructs, in a necessary disorder, these delicate pieces worked with a material concept, relevant in which it is very difficult to find both the hole and its origin.
Varela's literary cosmology, in which if he were not a master of color, form, and matter, if it were not for the aesthetic force of his works, we would say that Varela does not paint, write, or compose music.
