Rufina Santana: Cartographies of Water (Cartografias del Agua)

Rufina Santana:

Cartographies of Water (CartografĂ­as del agua)

Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum Florida International University 10975 SW 17th Street, Miami, FL 33199 t. 305.348.2890 | e. artinfo@fiu.edu | w. thefrost.fiu.edu Museum Hours: Tues.-Sat.: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. | Sun: 12 p.m.-5 p.m. | Mon.: Closed This exhibition is a partnership between FIU’s Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs, the Spanish and Mediterranean Studies Program and the Delegation of the Government of the Canary Islands in Miami. Additional support has been provided by TotalBank.

The Frost Art Museum receives ongoing support from the Steven and Dorothea Green Endowment; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor and the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners; Agustin Venero and the Venero Family; The Miami Herald; and the Members & Friends of The Frost Art Museum.

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Rufina Santana:

Cartographies of Water (Cartografías del agua)

Cover image: El viaje del héroe (The Hero’s Journey), 2015, acrylic on wood, 79 x 197 inches, Courtesy of the Artist

September 12, 2015 - December 13, 2015 Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum | Florida International University

Cartographies of Water Rufina Santana was born on the island of Gran Canaria. She has lived and worked on Lanzarote for many years. Her Canary Island heritage has influenced her work in a profound and lasting fashion: It has contoured her artistic outlook and carved her aesthetic awareness. As a consequence of her surroundings, art and nature are inseparable in the artist’s perception.

The ways in which the two connect represent the leitmotif of her work. The archipelago of the Canary Islands (which are part of Spain, despite being located just off the northwest coast of Africa) has a very special cultural and political history—one that has developed in between continents, at the periphery of global events and transformations.

Rufina Santana’s work reflects the artist’s peculiar milieu: She lives on an island surrounded by the ocean and formed from volcanic rock, an island with a very particular flora and fauna which UNESCO declared a biosphere reserve in 1993. The sea, that intimate and fateful force in the life experience of all islanders, separates and unifies all at once. It represents a barrier to interactions with the mainland, but at the same time it carries ships across the great divide. The sea is inseparably tied to the history of human civilization: It served as the backdrop for Greek mythology; it helped explorers and conquerors achieve fame; it has fed fishermen and supported sailors; and it is densely populated by cruise ships and military vessels in our day and age.

The sea, which covers underworlds that have remained entirely unexplored, has never ceased to inspire human imagination. It keeps memories alive and it births histories. Its sparkling surface is a projection screen on which Rufina Santana

the myths of Narcissus, Dionysus and Charon take form and shape. The waters of the sea have inspired Rufina Santana’s visual imagery, which now gains recognition on this shore of the Atlantic Ocean, where the warm waters of the Caribbean flow. Her exhibition, Cartographies of Water at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida international University is located at almost the same latitude as Santana’s homeland—which is often referred to as the “Islands of Eternal Spring”— the State of Florida was once claimed by Spanish conquistadores and is nowadays a region of buoyant immigration from Latin America.

Rufina Santana’s Cartographies of Water has left its mark on the history of maritime painting. Landscape paintings of marine settings developed at a comparatively late date into a selfcontained genre within the visual arts.

Maritime scenes were used primarily as mere backdrop for figurative subjects.

The Belgian painter Carlos de Haes popularized landscape painting in nineteenth-century Spain, thus clearing the path for artists such as Agustín Riancho, Aureliano de Beruete and Joaquín Vayreda (the founder of the Olot School of landscape painting).

Impressionist plain-air painting moved nature toward the center of visual art, and painters such as Joaquín Sorolla, Santiago Rusiñol and Joaquim Mir specialized in the depiction of maritime landscapes. During the Early Modern Age, representatives of the Vallecas School like Benjamín Palencia and Godofredo Ortega Muñoz focused on landscapes, while artists like Juan Manuel Díaz Caneja approached marine environments from a Cubist perspective.

In Latin America, landscape paintings

began to appear during the nineteenth century, when European artists with groundings in Romanticism traveled throughout the region in the company of natural scientists. Having expressed a desire to assist in the elevation of landscape painting to “unseen magnificence,” the German researcher Alexander von Humboldt fostered the formation of many artistic-scientific liaisons. His fellow German, Johann Moritz Rugendas, was the most famous painter in Humboldt’s sphere of influence. In fact, a number of the period’s visual artists such as the two Germans Eduard Hildebrandt and Ferdinand Bellermann, the Frenchmen Jean-Baptiste Debret and Camille Pissarro, the Englishman Daniel Thomas Egerton as well as the American Frederic Edwin Church participated in the second discovery of the “New World” as a natural repository. Among Latin America’s native painters, Rafael Troya in Ecuador and José María Velasco in Mexico produced panoramic depictions that anchored domestic landscapes in the consciousness of their contemporaries. Throughout the twentieth century, Latin American artists like Manuel Cabré, Rafael Monasterios and Armando Reverón in Venezuela; Ricardo Borrero Álvarez, Roberto Paramó and Gonzalo Ariza in Colombia; Arturo Borda in Bolivia; and Armando Morales in Nicaragua chose nature as their preferred genre of artistic expression.

Yet in modern and contemporary art, where borders between traditional genres dissipate, nature and landscape play increasingly different roles.

Rufina Santana’s paintings bear testimony to this trend in ways that make them comparable to artworks

by César Manrique of Lanzarote and Miquel Barceló of Majorca—both internationally acclaimed Spanish artists and environmentalists who present impressions of nature as unfettered compositions of color. Santana, who conceives of herself as rooted in such traditions as Lyrical Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism, adheres to impulses of informal painting by emphasizing the creative act of painting itself—possibly harking back to Jackson Pollock’s notion that he was not painting nature, but that he was nature. Pollock’s dripping technique, which enabled him to develop a randomizing approach to Surrealist painting, based the creative process on the trickling and flowing of the paint: He delegated creative power to the proper motion of liquid, a force that defies the stringent control of the artist’s hand. The resulting diversity in Santana’s work with regard to shapes, structures and patterns enshrines memories of water and the sea and preserves the morphological energy of the two. Rufina Santana’s imagery centers on landscape and nature. Yet, instead of depicting those entities in a figurative manner and capturing their outer gestalt, her art probes their essence along with the human desires and historical memories encapsulated within. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Impressionism, itself a driving force in the advance of abstract art during the postwar era, served as one of her major inspirations: Santana even dedicated her artwork El estanque de Monet to Claude Monet. The latter’s fascination with nature resulted in the creation of a garden at Giverny (a floral paradise that today is a natural monument), which inspired countless of Monet’s paintings and attracted

American painters like Theodore Robinson. Embellishing the walls of the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, Monet’s famous water lily paintings transform those rooms into sites for the meditative contemplation of nature. In a manner quite similar, Rufina Santana’s Cartographies of Water atmospherically charge the exhibition rooms at the Frost Art Museum, seducing visitors into a genuinely holistic experience. Relating to the dimensions of the human body, Santana’s three large-size canvases emanate a muralesque aura—best represented, perhaps, by the multipanel work El viaje del héroe. The small yet wide canvases, meanwhile, reveal themselves as panoramas that guide the views of the observer into maritime worlds. Opposite concepts such as close proximity and far distance, above and below, are abrogated because the sea appears as one entity in constant motion. Santana’s works submerge the viewer in water that is roiling, surging even beyond the borders of the frame.

The endlessness of the sea—whose boundaries are entirely intangible, and whose depths disappear in darkness, and whose expanse merge with the horizon—captures the imagination of the observer.

In Rufina Santana’s paintings, the sea appears as a cosmic metaphor.

It expresses mental states in which dreams, memories, experiences and desires—those of individuals and the manifestations of the collective subconscious—blend into a transcendent whole. Santana’s artworks are dominated by the luscious blue of the water and the skies above reflected in it. They also feature the white shades of ocean spray and the black of chiseled cliffs. Here and there, yellow-golden

tones make sporadic appearances.

The flowing and streaming of the water, its drive and roar are ingrained in the artist’s visual signature: They are evident in the verve and the intensity of the stroke of Santana’s brush, and in the surface structure of her paint, and also in the dramatic oscillation between light and dark.

In Santana’s art, a miraculous world reveals itself to the eye of the beholder. This world is fascinating and brimming with life, but at once also ominous and bottomless. It is a world that challenges humanity, embodied by Narcissus and the ferryman, two figures who shipwrecked on quests to uncover secrets of the world. Man challenges the elements (El viaje del héroe), yet some challenges are indomitable.

The sea covers the larger share of our planet. Water is the primordial compound required for the evolution of life, yet at the same time it can swallow us whole. Life and death exist firmly side-by-side. In the gestalt of the sea, water appears as a sphere of its own, disconnected from our habitat, beautiful in its very special way. In art, the beauty of water and the sea can become tangible, graspable, because art has the power to map and chart the abysmal.

In the paintings of Rufina Santana, the sea becomes art and water turns into images—images that excite us, or soothe us, but always engage us.

Michel Nungesser Berlin, July 2015 Translation from original German text: Lindsey Maxwell and Sven Kube Miami, September 2015

Cartographies of Water (Cartografías del Agua)

Salinas (Salt Pans), 2009 Acrylic on wood 10 x 27½ inches Courtesy of the Artist

Salinas y charcos (Salt Pans and Puddles), 2009 Acrylic on wood 7 x 27½ inches Courtesy of the Artist

Rufina Santana

Las orillas. El horizonte (The Shores. The Horizon), 2009 Acrylic on wood 7 x 27½ inches Courtesy of the Artist

Roques (Cliffs), 2009 Acrylic on wood 7 x 27½ inches Courtesy of the Artist

Cartographies of Water (Cartografías del Agua)