Edited by Danielle Carlo and Eduardo Subirats

Fernando Robles, Pareja de estrellas negras/ A Pair of Dark Stars (Acrylic and oil on canvas: 200 x 150cm, 2004)

CONTENTS

ESSAYS

Editorial Note

Introduction:

Against Intellectual Evasion through Academic Language:

Danielle Carlo

I America: Danielle Carlo

II The Disenchantment of Naïve Intellectuals:
Christopher Britt Arredondo

III Besieged Intellectual: Eduardo Subirats

IV Latin America: Some Assembly Required: Antoinette Hertel

V A Forgotten Essay Written by an Imaginary Student During a Lost Semester in a Make-Believe University: Danielle Carlo

VI Conversación entre Eduardo Subirats y Ángel Lozada en La Casa del Mofongo in Washington Heights comiéndonos un “sanculture.”

(English Translation of the Spanglish Original) Conversation between Eduardo Subirats and Angel Lozada, in the Heights, while eating "san-culture" for lunch.

PAINTINGS AND ARTWORK

(In order of appearance)

Fernando Robles, Pareja de estrellas negras/ A Pair of Dark Stars (Acrylic and oil on canvas: 200x150 cm, 2004)

Jorge Castillo, Payaso/ The Clown (Oil on canvas: 188 x 147 cm, 1957)

Jorge Castillo, Funámbulo/ Tightrope Walker (Chinese ink and Watercolor on paper: 50 x 35 cm, 1966)

Fernando Robles, Donde habita la luna/ Where the Moon Resides (Acrylic and oil on canvas: 200 x 150 cm, 2003)

Fernando Robles, Sueño Urbano/ Urban Dream (Acrylic and oil on canvas: 150 x 200 cm, 2004)

Fernando Robles, Bagdad Café (Acrylic and oil on canvas: 200 x 150 cm, 2004)

Manuel Guerrero, Sin título/ Untitled (Oil on canvas: 60 x 81 cm, 2009)

Fernando Robles, Pepenador del Siglo XXI/ 21st Century Scavenger (Acrylic and oil on canvas: 200 x 150cm, 2004)

Jorge Castillo, Persona sin importancia/ Person Without Importance (Oil on canvas:150 x 100cm, 1963)

***A NOTE ABOUT OUR PAINTERS AND PAINTINGS***

Jorge Castillo is a Hispano-Argentinean painter with an extremely large and diverse body of work, including sculpture, works on canvas, graphic design, graphic art and stage design. Despite the complexity of his work, he is stubbornly being ignored by the postintellectual experts on Latin American post-art. He is the most important Hispano-American painter after the generation of the historical avant-garde (Picasso, Ribera, Lam etc.). The relatively younger work of Fernando Robles, a Mexican painter and stage designer, is also ignored by the Mexican cultural bureaucracy. Together with Toledo he can be considered one of the most original living painters in México. Needless to say, there are obvious institutional interests in the consecration of Botero’s mediocrity as the sole and last expression of Latin American art. Antoinette Hertel, in her well documented essay, analyzes how this operates with magic realist literary production and creative writing as its commercial/academic corollary. Manuel Guerrero is a Colombian abstract painter with a consistent and colorful body of work. He could be presented as a jungle-artist who works together with shamans in Pasto.

We are thankful for the permission to reproduce these paintings.

I would like to make a short and provisional remark on the few paintings chosen for this rhapsody. Their selection, even if provisional, is by no means coincidental, nor is it our intention to post these paintings as meaningless ornamentation, as is usually done. Ponder on the souls depicted and their names: “dark stars” and “clowns,” a “Person Without Importance,” defeated warriors and scavengers in urban hell, a “tightrope walker,” and an agonizing “urban dreamer…” They are all characters of a poetic and nightmarish netherworld and metaphors for our damaged life. They portray our status as intellectuals and artists in an age of destruction and deceit.   

E.S.