Reynerio Tamayo is an artist that has his own ghosts, his obsessions and caprices. Vincent Van Gogh is his most frequent caller and also his paradigm, however, Leonardo Da Vinci, Velázquez, Goya, Dalí and Picasso are not less for him. Since I know Tamayo I was aware of his obsession for painting, for the humor and for this Caribbean island that holds his roots.
In the name of the seriousness, the good habits, the logic and the power; laugh and in a wider sense humor have been underestimated for a long time, basically for that part of the world self consider cultured, then Tamayo is opposed to it in an obstinate way insisting in drawing laughter and humor out of their enforced exile. He has of course estimated the effect of both, knowing that they are not innocuous towards history. He has conscience of their deep insight and repercussion that is similar to a tomography diagnose of the contemporary social body, resulting on the appearance of old sufferings some of which make metastasis.
When it comes to this artist, humor is a quality, a cultivated gift in a precious way, conveying patience and persistence until concreting a peculiar symbolic expression, a coherent and suggestive speech. By using the most diverse techniques: aquarelle, drawing, engraving, illustration, poster, ceramic, painting and installations. He walks along a way that he mixes by a fusion of themes like portraits, landscapes, still life productions, erotic paintings and caricatures.
His universe is based on the mixture, in the unit of the hybrid, among appropriations, cites and parodies. He has generally recycled, images from the most diverse procedures: Japanese engravings, Spanish paintings from XVII to XX century, the vanguards (cubism, futurism, surrealism, and suprematism); moreover the abstraction, the pop, the comics and also the culinary art, means of transportations, the objects of domestic use, the commercial products and the technologies added by the contemporary men to his comfort and addictions.
The sign of all these reorganized languages remain scattered in his peculiar way of doing, establishing a counterpoint between his voice and the echoes of the art history that lead us to the dynamic of his game, seasoned with the popular wisdom becoming actually in the jester of the city interval.
The current ensemble is expression of the success of his art while falling in and out within the stream of the Spanish and universal culture, showing the essences of the particular production that characterizes and defines him. His painting unveils a part of that carnival Batjing has reflected about and at the same time turns art into an extroversion, to which the audience is incited. The artist subverts from his uncouth reign of the absurd the effects caused by the syndromes of power and authority. The comprehension dissolves among irony, satyr and parody saving space for the black humor, the simple joke, the cleansed or lyrical metaphor, the fantasy and the Sabrosura tastiness. His work has become a melting pot with no recipes, exalted in the enjoyment of his own generic condition, and yes, it is a magical substance. His spirituality and each one of his cells are seen in every action or brushstroke. Dear is for sure the obsession of this lover of painting.
Tamayo establishes the rules of his game participating and juxtaposing opposed margins: the graphic and the pictorial, the popular and the cultured, the licentiousness and the seriousness, the comedy and the drama, its here where he opens the doors and offers options. You may select the safest alternatives to live or survive of in the core of a globalize roughness, emerge now this happy caprices of his like desires that escape from us and travel, whereas in the darkest of our nights for an slightest instant a thin line of light is drawn up in the sky as an unmistaken sign of rocket stars.