Hai Quin
Chiyo is not even considered the creator of Haiku.
The poet of events in motion, of what cannot be caught by the kinetic status of the trace, she jumps with her little net, balances in front of the indigo circle and the brief line made woman kneels before the nature of the fabric. She prays a spiritual chant that erotizes her. She offers herself. In order to understand ourselves, let us lay out another road out of this silk with the plane from the artist.
Serious toys. Instruments: anointed spatulas and pasted colors in her deep soul of pink black shade… Black pearls and rosy lotuses from crumbs and perfect plots for a serigraphy in large format amplified and fabulous. Cape, transparency, touch.
In the hope that the roof will not fall the studio opens in half-light. The atelier discover the animal offering and I hope that from the roof only the bird will fall and drop an egg which brings the needle that upon breaking will cut the braid that describes the major warrior:
Carlos Quintana, he appears before me.
To me he belongs to a high class, that of the great anointed Cuban painters who today inherited the power to exert the art of excellence by placing a hand over the fabric. Painting, what we call painting, I can see today here and now in the art of Carlos Quintana.
Hai-Quintana.
A wave of calmness that assists the animal, his knowledge prevents him from becoming beast; the beast lair is far from my cage. Any former comparison with the masters can undo the trace. He is a master and it is no wonder that this land gave birth to one of that dimension. Let us review the circular, visual, creole history.
The great ones who laid out a previous path in the museums of man pose silently for him, and visit him in the early morning hours. I know that.
A roaring wave, Hokusai drowns me by the joy of danger which the artist toys with in his rolling journey to the canvass. He dances a Haiku that slanted-eyed women can understand through the thin eye lashes, beautiful veil, nylon and bait in heat. The fish jumps, I am the bait.
Pregnant with the Haiku I argue with the works and they always beat me, blaming me for the demon and for the candor. Islander and frail, I attempt to tame the pink horse that still bleeds upon the fabric, twisting in the light of the studio and impressed I receive a “male offering;” he takes me by the hand, places with faith his eyes on the palm of my hands. My brief hand of “telltale.”
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.
The fall colors
Of the knotgrass seem
Like glasses of wine.
(by Isan)
Wine I have drunk in his dream, wine of a distinguished inebriation, study and religion, an ensemble of Chinese boxes, a tore up mechanism of “China paper” and if any restaurateur should raise the bodice of this fabric, will one day prove that red wine is also the component of these bodies travelling adrift of an exacted lunacy. Controlled and relaxed this route of wheel and map drawn on the royal palm of his hand.
Knife,
Take me where
The clouds are heading.
(and Uko)
The only thing that cuts is the key of his oaths, knives that are beaten as he passes, convoluted heads, which is the body and which the talking head. The entire description ends in an emotional hara-kiri which cuts the dream of the artist in tears. It is the most emotional piece created on this side, seen by my eyes in the last twenty years and exhibited on my island of mountains, salt, sugar and rituals.
Since the beginning of time
Only the dead know peace:
Life is but snow melting away.
(by Naudai)
Yes, but we the living read in the traces of the dead that rise with a fertile history to tell, that is the secret of Quintana. He has something to say beyond his hand or his conscience. We are all finally alive in the fertile consecration of the apparent subconscious. You have to see his temple to meet the process of layers and scratches, restated ideas picked from the useful bottom. I walked in and the drawing of my environment changed. It changed my head, the eye, the labyrinth became a bridge.
Yukio Mishima spoke about the visits to these temples:
“He waited until the man with the hands of a Buda begged him to open the latch that separated them. Upon being asked, she would lift such barrier and her incomparably beautiful body would appear in front of him as in their first encounter by the lake. That would invite him in.
The Great Imperial Concubine waited
But the Great Priest of the Shiga temple said nothing. Asked for nothing. After a while, the old hands released their pressure and the White fingers of the lady remained alone in the twilight of dawn. The priest walked away. A deadly cold descended upon the heart of the Great Imperial Concubine.
A few days later a rumor reached the Court, that the spirit of the great Priest had achieved the final liberation in his cell at Shiga. Upon hearing such news, the lady of Kyogoku devoted herself to copy in scrolls, with the most beautiful handwriting, the thoughts of the Sutras.”
I have stepped on the temple of the artist
Its warm snow dictates and blows
It defrosts my chalice with tears of thirst.
As tiny Chiyo did not return to write about Quintana’s Haiku collection. Extended sketches in vertical. I sense her dictation in all the planes they are taking place.
I read the fabric in an inspiring composition; the optic provocateur goes through the brevity of my body. I remember Max Ernst’s “Comment on force l’inspiración” “I sense that conciliatory coupling, on a plane in which appearances are not convenient for them.”