Fernando de Szyszlo

Fernando de SzyszloIn Praise of Darkness

May 18 - July 13, 2013

Bergamot Station 2525 Michigan Avenue E2 Santa Monica CA 90404

t.310.829.4455 www.latinamericanmasters.com

Fernando de Szyszlo began a lifelong study of Peru’s pre-Hispanic cultures in 1947. The following year he left for Paris, where he met Octavio Paz, Andre Breton, and other important figures. Returning to Lima in 1956, he created a highly personal body of abstract paintings, a synthesis of Modern and pre-Hispanic art, which quickly gained him international recognition.

Szyszlo’s paintings combine a sense of totemic figuration, with luminous contrasts of light and shadow inspired by Peru’s singular landscape. Many of his paintings are elegiac, rooted in an awareness of pre-Hispanic cultures and their destruction; while others brim with sensuality and a love of the physical world.

Fernando de Szyszlo’s paintings have appeared in important international exhibitions, including: The United States Collects Latin American Art, Art Institute Chicago, 1959; The Emergent Decade, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1965; and Art in Latin American Since Independence, Yale University, New Haven,1966. He has had over a hundred solo exhibitions, most recently a 2011 retrospective at Museo de Arte, Lima. His paintings are included in numerous collections, including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City and Museo de Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Szyszlo in the Labyrinth

Fernando de Szyszlo’s paintings delineate a vast, diverse and vertiginous geography, a labyrinth where even the most adept explorers could lose their way. Son of a Polish naturalist and a woman from the Peruvian coastal region, Szyszlo draws on a manifold of artistic sources that include pre-Columbian art, European vanguard movements, and some American and Latin American painters. It is possible that the landscape that has surrounded him for the better part of his life—the gray skies of Lima, his city, the deserts of the Pacific coastline laden with history and death, and that ocean which has appeared with such force in many of his paintings—has been as much of a determining influence in shaping his artistic world as the ancient legacy of anonymous pre-Columbian artisans whose masks, feather mantles, clay figurines, symbols and colors, are frequently and quintessentially depicted in his canvasses. But Szyzslo’s art is equally informed by the refined audacities, the contestations and experiments of modern art—of Cubism, abstract expressionism, surrealism,—without which his painting would not be what it is.

The personal—that shadowy stuff made of dreams, desires, premonitions, reminiscences and unconscious impulses—is surely as important in Szyszlo as the artistic currents that one can associate to his work, as important as whatever he has consciously admired or emulated. And it is likely that the inaccessible key to his mystery lies in that secret refuge of his personality. And mystery, along with his elegance and skill, is the great protagonist of his paintings.

Something always happens in his paintings, something beyond form and color. A spectacle, easy to sense, but hard to describe. It sometimes looks like a ceremony, an immolation or a sacrifice which could be taking place in a primeval altar: a barbaric and violent ritual in which somebody may be bleeding, disintegrating, giving in, and perhaps also experiencing pleasure. However one approaches it, the experience is not intelligible. It can only be approached as an obsession, a nightmare, or a vision. On many occasions my memory has suddenly channeled that strange totem, that recurrent character in Szyszlo’s paintings: a visceral remnant or perhaps a monument covered with disquieting offerings—ropes, spurs, suns, cuts, incisions, staffs. And I have asked myself innumerable times: Where does it come from? Who, what is it?

I know there are no definitive answers to these questions. But the fact that Szyszlo manages to raise them and keep them alive in the memory of those who encounter his artistic world, is a great testament to his art. Like Latin America itself, Szyszlo’s art dips into the night of ancient civilizations as it rubs elbows with more recent ones that have arisen throughout the globe. His art stands squarely at a cross-roads: eager, curious, craving, devoid of prejudice, open to any influence. And at the same time, he is stubbornly loyal to the secret depths of his heart, to that submerged and ardent intimacy where experiences and lessons metabolize in a place where the rational is at the service of the irrational, where the personality and genius of an artist can emerge.

Mario Vargas Llosa (Nobel Prize in Literature, 2010) Translated by Efrain Kristal

Trashumante, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 78 inches

The Death and the Maiden (Homenaje a F. Sch.), 2012, (diptych), acrylic on canvas, 70 x 156 inches

The Death and the Maiden, 2013, mixed-media, 78 x 62 inches

Mesa Ritual (Study), 2013, mixed-media, 31 1/2 x 39 inches

Paisaje/Paracas, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 31 1/2 x 39 inches

Mesa Ritual, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 58 1/2 x 46 inches

Sol Negro, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 39 x 31 1/2 inches

Paisaje, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 58 1/2 x 46 inches

Paracas: La Noche, 2013, mixed-media, 70 x 156 inches

Paisaje, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 39 x 31 1/2 inches

Trashumante, 2013, mixed-media, 39 x 31 1/2 inches

Fernando de Szyszlo

1. Trashumante, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 78 inches

2. The Death and the Maiden (Homenaje a F. Sch.), 2012, (diptych), acrylic on canvas, 70 x 156 inches

3. The Death and the Maiden, 2013, mixed-media, 78 x 62 inches

4. Mesa Ritual (Study), 2013, mixed-media, 31 1/2 x 39 inches

5. Paisaje/Paracas, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 31 1/2 x 39 inches

6. Mesa Ritual, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 58 1/2 x 46 inches

7. Sol Negro, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 39 x 31 1/2 inches

8. Paisaje, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 58 1/2 x 46 inches

9. Paracas: La Noche, 2013, mixed-media, 70 x 156 inches

10. Paisaje, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 39 x 31 1/2 inches

11. Trashumante, 2013, mixed-media, 39 x 31 1/2 inches

Latin American Masters

Since opening in 1987, Latin American Masters has earned a reputation as one of the world’s leading galleries for Latin American art. Latin American Masters has presented solo exhibitions for: Francisco Toledo, Olga de Amaral, Arnaldo Roche, Rufino Tamayo, Gunther Gerzso, Roberto Matta, Carlos Merida, Wifredo Lam, Armando Morales, and other important artists.

Latin American Masters is honored to have presented four solo exhibitions for Fernando de Szyszlo.