Carlos Quintana

En todas direcciones, 2008

Mixed media on canvas, 200 x 200 cm.


  • Carlos Quintana interacts with his paintings in different ways; he spreads the paint with his hands, and dilutes colours with turpentine or with his own saliva.
  • Carlos Quintana, the painter who taught himself to be a painter; interacts with his paintings in different ways, he spreads the paint with his hands, and dilutes colours with turpentine or with his own saliva.
  • Carlos Quintana’s narrative is rooted in non-traditional patterns: the scream, the question, the moan, and the colossal expression of pleasure, altogether being a ballad with technically flawless chords, based on the foundation of an academic education that he exhibits, relaxed, clever, and beaming, recording the moral of the story with his “his other orthography” written on the canvas that drew him to his original idea.
  • En el otro extremo de su estética encontramos obras como En todas direcciones, mucho más sobrias y minimalistas, y por esa razón menos irritantes a la vista pero más enigmáticas e inquietantes en su contenido.
  • The subjects emerging in his paintings frequently look to be Asian in some way, and that's another mystery. Figures arise from this gestural chaos even if you don't expect Quintana's paintings to be anything but abstract.

[…] Of course we are going astray. We have lost our course. No star guides us anymore. In vain we invent watches and compasses. The universe laughs gladly at our calculations, at our childish cardinal points. Our notions of space, of time, of infinitude, of eternity only entertain our ignorance, our fear. And it is scarcely probable that there has been a god on high (or in the underworld) destined to show us a better road. Why should he? We comfort ourselves thinking that he has been distracted or devoted to other matters. But the truth is that we have no privilege, no priority. The universe has not been designed to satisfy our wishes. We are there. Exactly like everything else. If we wish to dialogue with the cosmos, with nature, with the unknown, with art, with ourselves we must stand in all places at once. We must look (and be looked at) from all points, from all angles. We must abandon our rudimentary perspective. Isn’t that what you have tried to tell us? Not that the world is absurd. Or that everything is upside down. There is neither up or nor down nor on the sides. Neither before nor after. Everything is upside up. Beginning and end. And it has always been so. Bad luck if we have not understood it or have forgotten it. 1

 

1. Orlando Hernández, “Nibbling Buddha’s ear,” Ocho (Catalogue, Havana: Galería Habana, 2009), 27.