"Yo hablé con ellos"

"Codex"

"El gran pescador"

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The eternal search for paradise lost

Ximena Narea
Doctor in Aesthetic Science
Lund University, Sweden

Sergio Fuentes, born in 1949 in Santiago, Chile who lives in Malmö since 1983 is the first Latin American to have a solo exhibit at the Cultural Center “Valfisken” in Simrishamn, a simple yet well made building situated just a few meters from the Baltic Sea.  The exhibit was formally opened by Benkt Engqvist, director of the publication “Tanke och känsla” (thought and feeling).  The exhibit is almost totally a synthesis of what has been the work of this artist during this year.  In the large hall four paintings of enormous format are shown: The Great Fisherman; I Spoke with Them; preceded by five small paintings called Stories of the Earth I-V.  The third large painting, Codex is followed by three lithographs called Codex I-III which deal with the same topic; and finally the painting The Feathered Serpent.  In a side room there are ten lithographs made between 1992 and 1994 in which he works with the rituals and traditions of ancient cultures: The Shaman’s Trip, The Great Astronomer among others.

The themes of Sergio’s paintings are very connected to his research into ancient cultures and “primitive” cultures (or at least marginalized) which survive, such as the Sámi culture (located in the northernmost parts of Europe extending from the north of Norway, Sweden and Finland as well as Russia) and the Mapuche culture (southern Argentina and Chile).  His interest for ancient cultures dates from the beginning of the 70’s when he worked in the copper mines of El Salvador, in the north of Chile.  There, at an altitude of 3000 meters in the “planetary pampas” as Pablo Neruda the Chilean poet describes the “Inca Trail” and he becomes interested in that which once was a mighty civilization and which is part of the history of the Americas.  Once in Sweden, it was not by chance that he chose Jokkmokk, among the Sámi, to further his education.  More than studies, what took him there was to learn to know the Sámi people and their culture.  Preparing for this he had learned the Swedish language and making engravings.  His authentic interest in the Sámi culture opened the doors of this somewhat closed society, an interest which has continued by means of on-going visits to the area and receiving in his workshop Sámi young people who have come to Malmö to learn the techniques of lithography.

The painting I Spoke with Them summarizes that contact.  The title is suggestive, since it introduces us to his expressive and philosophical dialogue with the Sámi culture.  The painting is enormous (380 x 210 cm) and combines several elements of the Sámi tradition with archetypical geometric elements.  In the middle, a Sámi family poses in front of their hut.  The image, originally a small photograph enlarged photographically and then reworked.  (The enlargement to this extraordinary size “atomizes” the image.)  In the left upper corner there are fragments of an ancient map of the Russian part of the Sámi area, which appears in the book Lapponica by Schefferus (XVIII century).  In different parts of the picture small groups of reindeer wander about in unlimited space.  The archetypical element which he uses in this painting and in others, is the circle which makes a spiral as a shell.  As an image, the painting is very well done.  Not only the choice of formal elements, but the color (black for the picture and earth-colored for the background) gives the sensation of seeing an ancient picture.

Sergio is fearful of simplifying comparisons, and his fear is understandable.  It is easy to want to see in his paintings “the primitive within us” in the words of Pontus Kyander, especially when the artist has his roots in the southern part of the other hemisphere.  In his images there are shapes that can be likened to those of the works of Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso and others.  But his point of reference is not those painters, but rather the discovery on his own of the sources in which these shapes are repeated.  On one of his trips to Lapland, a Sámi showed him a wooden tablet which was used to measure time.  But time is not measured in hours.  In reality it is an atmospheric map that the shamans made to prevent probable difficulties and dangers during the migration of the reindeer, Sergio explains.  On the wooden tablet there were trees, spirals, churches and other objects, and that reminded me of Paul Klee.  What occurred to me was the same that happened to Pablo Picasso at the Trocadero Museum of Ethnology, whose discovery of the African masks reaffirms a search in his cubist experimentation.  I think we have been moving for a long time in search of paradise lost.

“It is a bit complicated to go around looking for roots in another country, because rapidly you will be told “why don’t you go to your country?”.  Had I gone to Australia I would have been interested in the Aborigines, because it is a continuation of that which I was doing in Chile”, he affirms.  “I try to be honest with myself to begin with.  My searching for roots does not try to solve unknowns in my immediate existence, but rather has to do with universal cultural manifestations, with mysterious shapes such as the circle, which is a basic figure which is repeated in all primitive peoples, but which we also express as perfect geometrical forms.”

Codex works with the concept of ellipses, as a figure and as a mathematical formula.  Inside an ellipse there is a strange trio of a human figure with two birds.  My interpretation begins with the figure of a bird which alternates in two forms: the complete figure of a bird and the figure of the head of a bird—which could be a pelican—on which the feet have three toes.  The form is compact and heavy.  In the upper right hand of the painting there is a figure which I take to be a bird-man.  Feathers are painted as zigzags covering the whole body.  The feet are fatter than those of the bird, and have four toes and the head has the eyes of a human figure which is at the upper left hand corner.  The man seems to fly: his body arched, simplified with a long tunic on which circular lines and broken lines alternate (a bit more complicated than the zigzags of the bird-man).  The head, which seems to be a mask, looks at the onlooker, it is oval, with the left side is shadowed with lines while the right side is clear; the face has a beard and the hair blows in the wind.  Its hands have five fingers.  The composition is interesting. It begins with a simple figure, pleasant to look at, and little by little absorbs the attention of the onlooker so that it captures them with a number of possible interpretations.

Among ancient cultures, the Mayan is especially interesting given its advanced mathematical and astronomical knowledge, as well as their poetic capacity.  It is also interesting for their rapid and mysterious disappearance.  From them we get the myth of the Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent, which was adopted by other cultures of the area, such as the Aztecs.  Sergio interprets this myth in his painting “The feathered Serpent”.  In this painting, the archetypical figure is the circle formed by the man in flight and the feathered serpent.  One figure follows the next in an inexhaustible movement.  It is the concept of eternity, with the serpent eating its own tail.  The serpent has wings and the same face as the bird-man of the painting we just described.

Another one of the large images is that of The Great Fisherman.  The painting has two moments: on the one hand the fisherman, represented more or less in the same style as the previous paintings in a boat accompanied by a seabird and waves breaking against the hull of the boat.  On the other side there is a fish of tremendous proportions followed by a smaller fish.  The scene which at first sight seems to be static is transformed into the dramatic moment in hunting the sea monster.  The moment in which man confronts nature in the struggle for survival.  The fisherman/hunter with outstretched arms is in the act of throwing his spear.  The sea bird with its eyes fixed on the giant fish which seems to get away, the ship advancing rapidly on a rough sea.  Farther ahead the giant fish, seeing the danger, dives under the water.

Sergio Fuentes works with few elements in his compositions which have great impact.  The color is soft toned, pastel-like, almost monochromatic, and always subordinate to the image.  Often the images have a tale, they belong to mythology and ancient legends to show scenes interpreted by the imagination of the painter.  The pictures follow each other naturally, either by features which are repeated or by figures which metamorphose to appear again in a different painting.  Sergio Fuentes plays with the archetypical figure of the circle, starting with its most simple representation to mathematical and cultural interpretations.  There are no strident tones that break the harmony of the images, because entering his creative world does not involve a visual or conceptual shock, but rather an introspective and retrospective process which shows us the path to paradise lost.

Translated by Thomas Rutschman 2009
Heterogenesis, Lund, Sweden