Mario Carreño

MARIO CARREÑO (Havana, Cuba, 1913 - Santiago de Chile, 1999).
Untitled, 1957.
Gouache on hard cardboard.
Signed and dated.
Certificate of authenticity attached.
Measurements: 50,5 x 60 cm; 63 x 73 cm (frame).

This magnificent work of Mario Carreño, signed in 1957, is clearly inscribed in his constructivist and abstract-geometric stage. It is a remarkable example of the most significant stage of his career, as it combines influences from cubism, Russian constructivism and pre-Columbian or Afro-Cuban aesthetics. The composition is structured as a kind of geometric mosaic or tapestry, built from rectangular and square planes of predominantly warm colors: reds, yellows, ochers, oranges and accents of black, white and sky blue.

In the center, elongated spindle-shaped or rhomboid figures stand out, which may evoke totems, ceremonial masks or stylized human figures. There are vertical patterns of parallel black lines on a light background, which could allude to scales, ritual hairstyles or architectural structures. Several elements have a clear axial symmetry, which gives the work an air of static rituality. Some forms evoke hourglasses, urns, or ancestral graphic symbols reinterpreted in a modern key. The inverted semicircles are reminiscent of smiles or ritual gestures, charged with an ambiguous energy.

This work belongs to Carreño's period in which he moves away from Caribbean figurativism and enters into an abstraction of mystical and architectural character. It reflects his interest in synthesizing Latin American cultural roots with European and North American avant-garde currents; the geometry here is neither cold nor rationalistic, but charged with rhythm, chromatic vibration and symbolism.

Carreño was a Cuban-Chilean painter, winner of Chile's National Art Prize in 1982. He studied art at the San Alejandro Academy in Havana (1925-1926), where he was taught by Antonio Rodriguez Morey, but after conflicts with some academics, disappointed, he dropped out and was accepted first as a retoucher and then as an illustrator at the Diario de la Marina. In 1932 he traveled to Europe to continue his studies in Graphic Arts at the San Fernando School in Madrid, but four years later he left Spain due to the Spanish Civil War. In 1934, he met the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, with whom he became a great friend. From Madrid, Carreño went to Mexico, where he came into contact with the main representatives of muralism: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo. He spent a brief period in Cuba and in 1937 he returned to Europe, this time to Paris, where he entered the Julien Academy and was a student of the painter Jean Souverbie. Two years later he had an exhibition at the famous Berheim-Jeune gallery, which consolidated him as an artist. He left Europe again with the outbreak of the Second World War and settled in New York. During the forties he spent long stays in his homeland, and in 1942 he was visited in Havana by the Mexican David Alfaro Siqueiros, with whom he painted a mural. In 1946 he became a professor of painting at The New School for Social Research in New York, which marked the beginning of an outstanding teaching career, which he developed in Havana, where between 1951 and 1954 he taught modern art at the San Alejandro School, and later in Chile. At that time he also began to write art commentaries in a weekly column for the magazines Carteles and Noticias de Arte. Carreño traveled to Chile for the first time in 1948, invited to exhibit in Santiago, at the Sala del Pacífico. Later, in 1956, he visited Chile again to teach courses on the evolution of contemporary art at the University of Chile, and two years later he settled there permanently. In 1958, the same year of his arrival, he gave art courses at the Summer School of the Federico Santa Maria Technical University in Valparaiso, and the following year he gave a series of classes entitled Evolution of Contemporary Art at the University of Concepcion. In 1959 he also founded, together with other artists such as Nemesio Antúnez, the Escuela de Arte de la Católica, where he taught painting workshops until 1969, when he was appointed deputy director of the school. That same year he obtained Chilean citizenship and the following year he took the chair of History of Contemporary Painting in Latin America. At that time, he wrote for a short time for the newspaper El Mercurio, replacing the critic Antonio Romera. Mario Carreño stopped painting in 1994 after suffering several strokes; he died in Santiago five years later. He had been married since 1965 to Ida González, who, like his previous wife, María Luisa Bermúdez, is a Chilean painter. His first wife, Cuban millionaire María Luisa Gómez-Mena, had left him in 1944 for the Spanish poet Manuel Altolaguirre. His works are in a number of museums in the United States, Latin America and Europe, as well as in important private collections around the world.