Exploring The Soul Through Art

JOSE LUIS CEUVAS can't escape the angst that dominates his work like the bass line on dance hall music. It enrages his passion for human drama and focuses his sportingly critical eye. Until August 13, the 42 pieces in his show at the National Gallery let us see those hidden corners of his psyche.

At 59, he remains one of the most important Latin American artists. He is confident about the huge body of work he has produced, and he explores any current of thought that will inform his art. But in a conversion with a writer at the Pegasus Polo Lounge recently, he seemed preoccupied with suffering, and with himself.

He sees suffering as the terrible demon of life that afflicts us all. It's man's inescapable dance with destiny. We live, we suffer. Coming from a cultural and religious tradition framed by the God-fearing Aztecs, he feels he is obsessed with death. "For Mexicans it's almost tribal and instinctive" says Cuevas.

He believes we all live in intolerable conditions regardless of our particular circumstances. His work is rudely cynical. Yet, it's also touched with what he calls his sour sense of humour. That's his way of diminishing life's sadness. French art might celebrate Joie de Vivre says Cuevas, but Mexican art dwells in the misery of our existence.

Still, he sees the ripe promises that gives comfort to the human condition. On his week-long visit here he admired what Rex Nettleford calls " Jamaica's collective, creative imagination." Now he plans to return for a month to paint and do other things. "I want to understand the indifference I see on the real faces in the country, not the cocktails face," says Cuevas.

Jamaicans may not be quite ready for the unsympathetic way he bares the human soul. "If people know how I look at them they will never approach me," says Cuevas. "I strip them of the mask they use to hide the interior." He believes that artist have the capacity to see into every corner of our souls," says Luis Ortiz Munosario, the Mexican Ambassador to Jamaica. "But he also becomes our accomplice”.

Narcissism

This absorption with cutting to the bone of others began with painting and photographing himself daily since he was ten. Before he begins work each morning, he sketches several self-portraits from the mirrors in his Mexican City studio. Sometimes he lets his wife photograph him. Or when traveling, he uses hotel mirrors or those in the house where he stays to capture the self portrait. "Every mirror is a different reflection of your face because the light changes," says Cuevas,” and one's character does too."

He files the self portraits in order to precisely archive what he calls his marks of age. "It is a masochist attitude to my own face. It's the attitude of a notary public, a testimonial to document what passes in my life."

The renowned Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes credits Cuevas as the artist who transformed his country's culture. After the Mexican revolution in 1910, much of Mexican art up to the 1950's celebrated revolutionary ideals, mostly in narrative murals. Politics and folklore dominated the themes since the government was art's sole patron in those years.

Visually and emotionally the best murals are arresting. Though not without European influences, Mexican mural art had its own styles and techniques. The art world still admires the three most important Mexican artists of this tradition: Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

But though popular, the murals were never seen as profound artistic visions. "Those artists penetrate the Mexican human condition," he argues, “they did not uncover Mexican experience to do that". His art didn't appease, but it stirred the imagination the way he foes when he talks about himself.