Carlos Quintana

Sumisión, 2008

Mixed media on canvas, 200 x 200 cm.


  • Without question, one of the main protagonists of the current Cuban contemporary plastic arts is Carlos Quintana.
  • Carlos Quintana forma parte de la categoría de los independientes irreductibles, de los francotiradores inclasificables que no aprendieron la pintura en escuelas de bellas artes o en academias sino casi por azar.
  • Su obra, sui generis, improvisa nuevos argumentos, perspectivas para recrear el encuentro, la coexistencia entre lo ancestral y lo contemporáneo, lo divino y lo secular, lo espiritual y lo pagano.
  • Carlos Quintana ha legitimado metodologías o presupuestos que dejan por sentada la credibilidad de una transición, de una continuidad dentro de esa vertiente histórica del arte cubano, la pintura.
  • A deep look to Carlos Quintana’s work shows us his magic universe, the influence of Afro-Cuban religion in his masterpieces and his visual poetry parented with Asian art.

[…] Haiga

In order not to leave Haiku to nothingness, many poets paint the scream, generally without too much perfection, chasing the echo from the West. Matsuo Basho was the first poet to adopt this type of Haiku illumined by hand; Carlos Quintana knows the brief poems dividing the painting in the following way.

Out of the foggy depths of its primal grace, a stain, uprooted defloration before the canvass, emerges slowly to the essential plane.

From the upper and lower plane of the frame heads appear, he does not repeat the heads, instead the words are repeated, a double game of screams that remind you, we are not alone, sprouted from a thousand orgasms, a sample of a supposed eternity in this life randomly resulting from our own morphology, a floating head, living on, then acquiring a national and firm trait relating to our gaze in broad light.

Each one of these glances at the work can be different, it is your mood and its whiteness, once again the feeling hangs from the fabric and in the reading of the fabric a hundred better versions appear conversing with that first glance. You have to tune your ear to the Haiku, see beyond.

Fragments of drawings as sentences, convoluted heads and punishment cells. All of that happens because Quintana allows us to steal his images; he has so many that can afford to let us take them home.

I walked out dissolved in ink, writing without makeup, without dresses, I levitated with the rare tropical cold wind, his ideas charm like golden dust, rice powder, and powerful weird powders.

Promises broken upon the silk and a lucid drunkenness which pours the last stream that becomes obsolete with the first lighted leaf at dawn. “The traditional Haiku contains 17 mores (a linguistic unit of lower rank than a syllable) arranged in 5, 7 and 5 mores, with no rhyme. It tends to include both a key Word known as kigo (fourth language), indicating the season of the year it refers to, then a verbal pause, the kire, which separates a Haiku in two contrasting images.”

Thus I read the work of Carlos Quintana. Pain and ink silently springing.

Carlos has already described the natural phenomena, the change of seasons, or the daily life of people that will not leave you alone. Much influenced by Zen philosophy and aesthetics, the Afro-Cuban sentence in the free verse that expresses it, his style is characterized by an uncommon subtlety, austere so as not to poison us, that apparent symmetry that suggests its freedom and along with this, eternity, by finding the great in all that happens.

That “All” moves and converges morphologically in these two mixed poetic discourses. Haiku-Quintana […]. 1

 

1. Wendy Guerra, “HaiQuin,” Nada (Catalogue, Havana: National Fine Arts Museum, 2011).