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Lot Essay
Portocarrero explored urban and rural themes. Of Spanish descent, he was equally at home with the rich nineteenth-century colonial heritage- including its element of pious mysticism, which also inspired Ponce- as he was with Afro-Cuban and guajiro life. The critic Guy Perez Cisneros noted that Portocarrero represented a convergence of Spain, Africa, and Indoamerica in the centrally located "Atlantic" island of Cuba. The artist's Cerro Interior series of 1943 is a nostalgic rumination on his memories of childhood. He was another young artist who followed in the steps of Amelia Peláez in his use of the somewhat-forgotten baroque forms and colors of colonial Cuba. Portocarrero was a master of excess; his curlicues, finials, stained glass, tiled floors, and gingerbread screens are the anthitesis of architectural and decorative styles imported from the United States and Europe during this period of streamlined reductivism. Even the inhabitants of this Cerro interiors differ from the 1940s Hollywood ideals of popular Cuba. They are the solid, frumpishly attired women of the bourgeoisie. Like Carreño and Cundo Bermúdez, Portocarrero's "horror vacui" is closer to folksy exuberance than it is to the more cerebral compositions of Peláez.
A 1944 visit to the countryside led to a series of landscapes described by the artist as follows: "My guajiro landscapes were the result of a few days visit to the Valley of Vinales (Province of Pinar del Rio). I went into a kind of ecstasy in front of the natural beauty, which translated into paintings in which the import of the countryside forcefully manifests itself." Like Carlos Enriquez's scenes of rural violence, Carreño's Tornado, and Wifredo Lam's The Jungle- all paintings of the early 1940s- Portocarrero's landscapes are not bucolic or idealized; instead, they are often filled with danger and inhuman forces. The paisaje (Familia Feliz) included in here is not a peaceful scene. A small red devil on a donkey approaches their "bohio," as a man and a woman, watched by their neighbors, flee down a path. Looming in the foreground is a ceiba tree, sacred in Afro-Cuban folklore. This painting is based on a guajiro legend that is part of oral tradition; it tells of a happy family whose existence is disrupted by the sudden appearance of the devil.
Giulio V. Blanc
Excerpt from Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries 1938-1952, Cuban Modernism: The Search for a National Ethos, Harry N. Abrams, 1992, p. 53.
A 1944 visit to the countryside led to a series of landscapes described by the artist as follows: "My guajiro landscapes were the result of a few days visit to the Valley of Vinales (Province of Pinar del Rio). I went into a kind of ecstasy in front of the natural beauty, which translated into paintings in which the import of the countryside forcefully manifests itself." Like Carlos Enriquez's scenes of rural violence, Carreño's Tornado, and Wifredo Lam's The Jungle- all paintings of the early 1940s- Portocarrero's landscapes are not bucolic or idealized; instead, they are often filled with danger and inhuman forces. The paisaje (Familia Feliz) included in here is not a peaceful scene. A small red devil on a donkey approaches their "bohio," as a man and a woman, watched by their neighbors, flee down a path. Looming in the foreground is a ceiba tree, sacred in Afro-Cuban folklore. This painting is based on a guajiro legend that is part of oral tradition; it tells of a happy family whose existence is disrupted by the sudden appearance of the devil.
Giulio V. Blanc
Excerpt from Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries 1938-1952, Cuban Modernism: The Search for a National Ethos, Harry N. Abrams, 1992, p. 53.