Tag: neo-impressionism

Carlos Alfonzo

The Paintings of Carlos Alfonzo

Born in Havana in 1950, Carlos Alfonzo was a Cuban-American painter and ceramicist whose Neo-Impressionist style incorporated forms from Cuban Santeria, Catholic medieval mysticism, and tarot cards to form a symbolic vocabulary for his work. 

Carlos Alfonzo began his artistic training at the Academia de Belle Artes San Alejandro in Havana where he studied painting, print making and sculpture. After receiving his degree in 1973, Alfonzo attended the University of Havana where he received a degree in Art History in 1977. As a student, he began to introduce Afro-Cuban religious symbols from various sects into his work. Alfonzo, although raised as a Catholic, often blended pagan and Christian imagery to reveal their overlapping symbolisms as well as their connections to the issues of passion, masculine power, and sin.

During the 1970s, Alfonzo was an active participant in Cuba’s artistic community. However, he grew increasingly dissatisfied  with the country’s Revolution and discouraged by the travel restrictions and pervasive homophobia. In 1980, Alfonzo was deemed undesirable as a gay man by the Cuban government and, after several days of refuge with others at the Peruvian embassy, was able to leave Cuba during the Mariel Boat-Lift. An agreement arranged between Cuban-Americans in the United States and Fidel Castro allowed the release of many Cubans from the increasing restrictive conditions on the island. After a journey marred by violence, Alfonzo settled in Miami where he was able to explore both his art and his life. 

Carlos Alfonzo’s wildly energetic work was quickly embraced among the artistic circles in the United States. Three years after arriving in the United States, he was awarded a Cintas Fellowship in the visual arts and, in the next year, a 1984 Fellowship in Painting from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington D.C. In the 1980s and 1990s, Alfonzo began to exhibit his work internationally and participated in a number of traveling exhibitions that concentrated on LatinX artists.

Alfonzo’s earliest work was inspired by the visible symbols contained within the propaganda produced under the Castro regime. Later works embraced the impressionistic work of such artists as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Alonzo’s work was also influenced by that of Cuban painter Wilfredo Óscar Lam y Castilla, an artist who fused Surrealist and Cubist approaches to art with images and symbols from Santeria. Many of Alonzo’s paintings contain subtle hints of his sexuality or invoke the fear and anger generated by the deaths of the AIDS epidemic. During the last year of his life, Alfonzo radically reduced his color palette and began an intense use of pictorial markings on large, dull-colored paintings that expressed a range of emotions.

Carlos Alfonzo, in addition to his paintings, produced a great number of works in clay and painted ceramics over a span of ten years. Interested in public works, he personally made and glazed all the ceramic tiles for his two iconic public murals in South Florida. The 1986 ceramic “Ceremony of the Tropics” at the Santa Clara Metro-Rail Station was a project of Miami’s Art in Public Places program overseen by artist and curator Cesar Trasobares. Alfonzo’s second ceramic mural was the 1991 site-specific “Brainstorm” commissioned by the Florida International University.  

Before he left Cuba, Alfonzo had two solo shows in Havana. The first was in 1976 at Galeria Amelia Pelaez and the second at Havana’s Museo Nacional in 1977. Alfonzo’s first solo exhibition in the United States, “Paradiso” which featured paintings, ceramics and works on paper, was held at New York City’s Hal Bromm Gallery on Madison Avenue in 1987. His other solo exhibitions were held at Houston’s McMurtey Gallery and the Osuna Gallery in Washington DC as well as the Bass Museum of Art and the Lannan Museum, both in Florida. 

In 1987, Alfonzo entered his work in the group exhibition, “Hispanic Art in the United States”, held at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. His paintings were entered in the 1990 seminal  multi-venue show “The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s” at New York City’s Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art. This exhibition later traveled to the city’s The New Museum of Contemporary Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem. In 1991, Alfonzo’s paintings were chosen to be included in that year’s Whitney Biennial held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. 

Carlos Alfonzo lived and worked in Miami, Florida until his death in 1991 from a cerebral hemorrhage with AIDS-related complications at the age of forty-one. His work is held in many private collections and such public collections as the Miami Art Museum, the Kendall Art Center, Washington D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska, among others.

Notes: Art historian and curator Julia P. Herzberg has an extensive and informative article entitled “Carlos Alfonzo: Transformative Work from Cuba to Miami and the U.S.” on her site:  https://www.juliaherzberg.net/carlos-alfonzo

The online site of Miami’s New Times has an article by Isabella Marie Garcia entitled “The Dark Poignancy of Carlos Alfonzo’s Life” which covers the 2020 retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami: https://www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/things-to-do-in-miami-carlos-alfonzo-late-paintings-at-institute-of-contemporary-art-miami-14372933

The Farber Foundation’s The Archive: Cuban Art News has an article written by Janet Batet on Carlos Alfonzo’s late-career art: https://cubanartnewsarchive.org/2018/07/11/screaming-heads-and-still-lifes-the-late-career-art-of-carlos-alfonzo/

Top Insert Image: Ramiro Fernandez, “Carlos Alfonzo”, Date Unknown, Color Print, Miami New Times, May 2022

Second Insert Image: Carlos Alfonzo, Untitled, 1987, Acrylic on Paper, 76.2 x 56.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Carlos Alfonzo, Untitled, 1980-1989, Linocut Print, Artist Proof, 68.6 x 106.7 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Carlos Alfonzo, Untitled (Nine Figures Inside a Maze), 1979, Mixed Media on Paper on Board, 64.8 x 50.2 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Carlos Alfonzo, “Still Life with AIDS Victim”, 1990, Oil on Canvas, 213.4 x 213.4 cm, Private Collection

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia, “Pierrot”, 1932-1937, Oil on Canvas, 196 x 130,5 cm, Private Collection

Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia was born in Paris to a French mother and a Cuban father of an aristocratic Spanish descent. Financially independent, Picabia studied under Fernand Cormon and others at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in the late 1890s. Fernand Cormon, one of France’s leading historical and portrait artists, took Picabia into his Atelier Cormon, where Vincent van Gough and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had also studied.

After shortly experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism at the initial stage of his career, Francis Picabia became associated with Cubism as his highly abstract compositions were colorful and rich in contrasts. He was also in his early career between 1903 to 1908 influenced by the impressionsit paintings of Alfred Sisley.

After short stints with Fauvism and Neo-Impressionism, Picabia became the major artist of the Dada movement. He was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment as a whole. Despite the association with so many movements, Picabia managed to leave a strong mark on all of them and it is fair to say that the entire outlook of the modern art would not be quite the same if Picabia was never a part of its crucial early-twentieth century stage.

Paul Signac

Paul Signac, “Blessing of the Tuna Fleet at Groix”, Oil on Canvas, 1923, Minneapolis Institute of Art

Neo- Impressionism flourished from 1886 to 1906. The term was coined by art critic Félix Fénéon in 1886 to describe the innovative work of the pioneers of this daring new vision.

Neo-Impressionism extended its reach beyond France to Belgium as well, where an avant-garde group known as Les Vingt (Les XX) embraced Seurat’s ideals following the 1887 exhibition in Brussels of his masterpiece “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte”. Théo van Rysselberghe was also a member of this highly visible Belgian circle.  Even Henri Matisse briefly experimented with a Neo-Impressionist technique, prompted in part by the influence of Signac’s treatise “From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism” and by the invitation to paint with Signac at his Saint-Tropez residence.

Neo-Impressionists rejected the random spontaneity of Impressionism. They sought to impose order on the visual experience of nature by way of codified, scientific principles. An optical theory known as “mélange optique” was formulated to describe the idea that separate, often contrasting colors would combine in the eye of the viewer to achieve the desired chromatic effect.

The separation of color through individual strokes of pigment came to be known as “Divisionism” while the application of precise dots of paint came to be called “Pointillism.” According to Neo-Impressionist theory, the application of paint in this fashion set up vibrations of colored light that produced an optical purity not achieved by the conventional mixing of pigments on canvas.