CARLOS ALFONZO (1950-1991)
CARLOS ALFONZO (1950-1991)
CARLOS ALFONZO (1950-1991)
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CARLOS ALFONZO (1950-1991)
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CARLOS ALFONZO (1950-1991)

Untitled

Details
CARLOS ALFONZO (1950-1991)
Untitled
signed and dated 'ALFONZO 87' (lower left)
oil on canvas
95 x 86 ½ in. (241.3 x 219.7 cm.)
Painted in 1987.
Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner, 1987

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Lot Essay

“My works are language links and barriers and straight continuity of my daily life,” Alfonzo once reflected. “It could happen that thoughts, diverse feelings and also death may end or start with them. The fact of not comprehending them totally would not make me feel uncomfortable but as part of lifetime revelations they provide the magic to understand God and the universe” (in The Art of Miami, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, 1985). At the forefront of the Miami generation in the 1980s, Alfonzo tapped the cultural mythos of Cuban America in paintings that scour the depths of human suffering and mortality. The outstanding artist of the “Marielitos,” he came to prominence within a broadly defined diasporic generation that included Ana Mendieta, María Brito, and César Trasobares, among others. Working in an allusive, expressionist idiom grounded in his experience of exile and subsequently of the AIDS epidemic, he developed a rich symbology gleaned from differing belief systems—Catholicism, Afro-Cuban Santería, the occult Rosicrucian order—and diffused through syncretic allegories of time and place.

Alfonzo’s practice took an introspective and self-consciously spiritual turn in the late 1980s, the lyrical dramaturgy of his painting conjuring mysteries of body and soul. Rendered in increasingly resonant and metamorphic color, these canvases—notably, the pendant paintings Paradiso and God (Turned Backwards) and the monumental In Flesh and In Spirit, all from 1988—cogitate over material and mystical transformations, their energy vital and apocalyptic. “As he approaches the ‘90s,” observed Giulio V. Blanc, the foremost critic of the Miami generation, “Alfonzo is attempting to pare down his baroque excesses. Fewer elements are present in the compositions and an interest in color and its lack of subordination to line is more evident than ever. While the example of the abstract expressionists has contributed to this, Alfonzo points to fauvism and to Matisse’s life-long struggle to balance color and line as sources” (“The Enigmatic Carlos Alfonzo: Beyond the ‘New Hispanic Art,’” Arts Magazine 64, October 1989, p. 14). Acknowledged sources also include Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose work Alfonzo first saw in New York, in 1982, at the Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; he doubtless would have seen Vasily Kandinsky’s swirling abstractions at the Guggenheim, paintings whose cosmic dynamism set a bar for his own.

The present painting churns with poignant and portentous imagery—spirals and whorls, nails and knives—that crisscrosses the canvas in kaleidoscopic gashes of color. “Life and death are present in my works,” Alfonzo explained. “Sexual organs are there—speaking to desire, temptation, reproduction, and so forth. It seems to me that today, as much as at any time in history, people live, are persecuted, and die for ideals. So the concept of martyrdom is important... It doesn’t really matter whether the piercing instrument is an arrow, a nail, or a knife, or the subject is St. Sebastian [killed by an arrow] or the cyclops, I use these motifs as symbols of martyrdom and violence.” Alfonzo related these elements to his memories of Cuba (“as a place of frustration, violence, and fear”) but eschewed a reductive reading of his canvases through “narrative or anecdote,” rather insisting on their universality. “I am interested in a poetic, mysterious quality even though there are specific themes I ‘unwind,’” he allowed. “I’m trying to communicate a sense of life’s mystery. At the same time I struggle to understand my own place in what I sense is a great unknown. I try through my visual language to suggest the presence of mystical forces that surround us and are part of us... I myself am trying to come to terms with human existence—with life, death, fate, and solitude” (in J. Herzberg, “Conversations with Carlos Alfonzo,” Carlos Alfonzo: Triumph of the Spirit, Miami Art Museum, 1997, pp. 127 & 129).

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park

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