Santos de Palo

                                                 
                                                 "Santos de palo"
                                                  Oleo sobre lino
                                                  30x24"
                                                  2011

THE COLOR OF WHAT IS TANGIBLE-CHECO´S STILL LIFE PAINTING


By Dr. Laura Gil Fiallo
President of ADCA
Chairwoman of Investigations at the MAM
Translated by Maximo Encarnacion



When Octavio Paz referred to Latin America as a continent where catholic people from the times of Pedro Ermitaño live together with men from the year 2000, he referred, doubtless, to all aspects of life and culture, and for that reason, to art. But he forgot to mention an aspect –the domain of what is intemporal. It is where artists like Jorge Checo move. He, with impeccable technique, not only recreates the topics of classic and baroque still life painting, but also assures, in addition, within what is illusory and what is tangible, a space in the land of nobody, where what is real and what is apparent intersect.



Checo is, all in all, a colorist, and the joy with which he rhymes the complementary colors in a still life painting with peppers in it is indescribable. Red, green, red again and green again. They succeed with the simple and irrefutable harmony with which the Circassian rhythm and the passage of the seasons of the year do it. This adapting to the sequential truth of the Cosmos is what provides Jorge Checo´s images the so relaxing and intemporal aspect, which takes us away from the hustle and bustle of the moment and provides us, with naturalness, with a moment of beauty and everyday ecstasy, in the very heart of simple living.



Simple abundance is recreated in the fruits of the land and their tangible and concrete naturalness. Barthes itself discovers still life painting in the baroque, but it also has some sort of fetish. Above all, in those tools of farming, which, in a moment of abandonment, fuse the strangeness that implies the descontextualization of the domain of what is pragmatic with the stop of the instant that is connatural to the aesthetic experience in order to enlighten a little bit the mystery of what is existent, of the simple magic of what is tangible, of color, and of light.



Profoundly sensual and pensive, the artist recreates himself in the details, and in the linear rhythms. Just the way Zurbaran and Michelangelo Caravaggio did centuries ago. But the fruits and the tools of the Antillean world, the cassava and the fruits from the Caribbean, in a sensual registry, obsessed by the turgid shapes, by the curve, by the intense and illuminated color, which strongly evokes the aroma, the restrained passion, the fertility and the joy with which the love for the land, for the soil that nourishes and supports us, whose conscience we are; as much as showing her and its fruits, we also identify with the way of islands, the luminous archipelago, which, like to her sons and daughters, she saw us and made us.