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Lot Essay
El zoológico (The Zoo) by Mario Carreño, unquestionably one of the most relevant members of the second generation of the Cuban Vanguardia, is a unique example of the philosophical and formal research with which the artist became engaged after World War II. This work is a reflection of the modern crossroads of ideas inspiring the most well established Latin American artists at the time. It is also an expression of Carreño's personal and intellectual journey.
In 1944, after divorcing María Luisa Gómez Mena, the wealthy Cuban art patron, Carreño was living and working in New York as an art professor, teaching privately as well as at The New School for Social Research with the renowned Ecuadorian painter Camilo Egas. That year he met María Luisa Bermúdez, a Chilean nursing student who became his second wife and a reason to travel to South America. In 1948 he visited Santiago de Chile for the first time, and had a solo exhibition at Sala del Pacífico. The following year he exhibited at Galería Samos in Buenos Aires, later re-named Bonino after its owner, Alfredo Bonino.
Carreño published a literary homage to Caribbean culture, Antillanas, in 1949, collaborating with Spanish intellectual and art critic Antonio Rodríguez Romera. This publication was Carreño's opportunity to shed some light into a phase of his work that had begun around 1945 and surfaced in his second solo exhibition at Perls Galleries in New York. He was shifting away from the classical Renaissance influence acquired in Europe; his volumetric baroque forms became planimetric, engaged and built through a web of simple lines, with a focus on the essentiality of life. Pre-columbian forms and indigenous designs of tapestry inspired him, as did the poetry of the Chilean Pablo Neruda.
Carreño was responding to the philosophical writings of the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer, who stated that the aesthetic essence is an objectified sense of oneself. Early on Worringer had raised abstraction to the category of art, validating its existence since primitive times. He had proposed the reduction of an object to its basic form, in search of formal purity. Carreño's relation with Latin American artists and intellectuals like Emilio Pettoruti, Córdoba Iturburu, Xul Solar and Guillermo de Torres intensified his attraction to isomorphic theory. He was interested in the exaltation of the arabesque, journeying toward a formal abstraction in which each represented form was snatched out of its historical essence.
Included in the 1951 exhibition Carreño: Recent Paintings at the famed mid-century New York Perls Galleries, El zoológico is a reflection of all these acquired theoretical ideas. The painting is a highly stylized representation of animals in captivity, composed of basic forms inspired by primitive ancient drawings. The pictorial plane is divided into spatial zones, defined by a restrictive palette of colors. A cerebral architectural structure serves to balance the composition while creating a multi-visual landscape. As a whole, the painting suggests a view from atmospheric distance, a vantage point revealing less vibrant colors than those of the Caribbean: the result of a year spent in continuous winter as Carreño traveled from New York to Santiago de Chile.
Rafael DiazCasas, independent curator and art historian
In 1944, after divorcing María Luisa Gómez Mena, the wealthy Cuban art patron, Carreño was living and working in New York as an art professor, teaching privately as well as at The New School for Social Research with the renowned Ecuadorian painter Camilo Egas. That year he met María Luisa Bermúdez, a Chilean nursing student who became his second wife and a reason to travel to South America. In 1948 he visited Santiago de Chile for the first time, and had a solo exhibition at Sala del Pacífico. The following year he exhibited at Galería Samos in Buenos Aires, later re-named Bonino after its owner, Alfredo Bonino.
Carreño published a literary homage to Caribbean culture, Antillanas, in 1949, collaborating with Spanish intellectual and art critic Antonio Rodríguez Romera. This publication was Carreño's opportunity to shed some light into a phase of his work that had begun around 1945 and surfaced in his second solo exhibition at Perls Galleries in New York. He was shifting away from the classical Renaissance influence acquired in Europe; his volumetric baroque forms became planimetric, engaged and built through a web of simple lines, with a focus on the essentiality of life. Pre-columbian forms and indigenous designs of tapestry inspired him, as did the poetry of the Chilean Pablo Neruda.
Carreño was responding to the philosophical writings of the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer, who stated that the aesthetic essence is an objectified sense of oneself. Early on Worringer had raised abstraction to the category of art, validating its existence since primitive times. He had proposed the reduction of an object to its basic form, in search of formal purity. Carreño's relation with Latin American artists and intellectuals like Emilio Pettoruti, Córdoba Iturburu, Xul Solar and Guillermo de Torres intensified his attraction to isomorphic theory. He was interested in the exaltation of the arabesque, journeying toward a formal abstraction in which each represented form was snatched out of its historical essence.
Included in the 1951 exhibition Carreño: Recent Paintings at the famed mid-century New York Perls Galleries, El zoológico is a reflection of all these acquired theoretical ideas. The painting is a highly stylized representation of animals in captivity, composed of basic forms inspired by primitive ancient drawings. The pictorial plane is divided into spatial zones, defined by a restrictive palette of colors. A cerebral architectural structure serves to balance the composition while creating a multi-visual landscape. As a whole, the painting suggests a view from atmospheric distance, a vantage point revealing less vibrant colors than those of the Caribbean: the result of a year spent in continuous winter as Carreño traveled from New York to Santiago de Chile.
Rafael DiazCasas, independent curator and art historian