Now, maybe it was because the rainy season had just drawn to a close after a particularly dark and grey several weeks, or maybe it was having just  been in a studio surrounded by Lucía ’s riotous, fauve palette, but upon walking into the pure Guatemalan sunlight I felt a visceral understanding of what drives Lucía to make many of her aesthetic choices.

Looking back through the window and into her studio, it was clear: Lucía  Morán Giracca sees the colors of this world in a very different way than most of the rest of us. The sky in this country, for six months of the year, is her color blue, but I rarely even notice it, other than to idly think, “Hey, nice day today.” But Lucía  captures those colors like she’s experiencing them for the first time. Really. Choose any of the images on these pages and start ticking off where you’ve seen these colors in your days and ways about Central America. This oxidized red is the exact expression of the walls on 3rd Calle. That yellow must have been pulled from the cornfields in April near Tecpán. The way this white and those shades of brown play off one another is certainly pulled from a dream of a ceiba tree.

Continue as you will.

When we returned inside, I asked Lucía  about her palette. Was it intentionally Guatemalan, or was I just making that up?

“Well, yes,” she said plainly. “It is a Guatemalan palette. When I was in Spain [Morán has spent two of the past four years in Barcelona, painting and showing in Europe] I found that my colors took on a less vibrant form. Such bright colors shock people over there. But here, it’s coming back. The blues, particularly.”

She continued, “But it’s not just the colors. I also use forms that are intentionally about Guatemala.”

I asked her to explain and she obliged by walking me around the room and pointing to repeated images and patterns I’d not yet seen in the work.

Referring to the two images that are on page 14, Lucía  spoke of the importance of la pila in Guatemalan life.

“Here it is, this heavy, almost immovable thing that exists in every house in Guatemala. It’s at the pila that so much work is put into making your world clean. It takes so much work. But it is also so logical in its own way, one basin for clean water, one for washing.”

I understood her that this was much like Guatemala, itself. I was going to ask her directly, but she pulled my attention to another icon that returns over and over in her work.

“In Guatemala we all live inside bubbles, las burbujas. At times we have to, they keep us sane from all the violence and the craziness of this country. I’ve had a number of friends killed in the last year, friends who were trying to change things just a bit for the better in this country, and so they were killed. Sometimes we need our bubbles to keep us sane, or to give us the strength to fight. But those bubbles can also keep us from one another, and no matter what, we are vulnerable inside them, fearful that they will be pierced. There’s an ambiguity there. Or a way that both things are true.”

Lucía  thought for a moment. I’d imagine she was thinking about those absent friends.

“Why is the show titled Gota a Gota,” I asked.

“I think you have a similar expression in English. Drop by drop, yes? Gota a gota you fill the ocean. Guatemala sits under the blue sky, under rain clouds made of drops, clouds that are beautiful, but that obscure the sun, clouds that can bring terrible destruction. Those small drops are our sweat. Our blood. Our saliva. Our way to be clean. Our disaster if they come too fast and bury us alive under a mudslide. They are our relief, as well. Our tears.

“And, drop by drop, gota a gota, they define our lives. Look for them in the paintings. They are always with us as we work to communicate, to love, to live.”

She seems very serious for a moment, then cocks her head back and laughs.

”Also, I just love the way they look. I love their form. I love to paint their natural lines, the way it arcs.

“I think that’s important, too. Beauty, particularly in nature, is important, too. We shouldn’t forget it. Not in Guatemala.”

Lucía Morán Giracca’s Gota a Gota is opening at La Galería de Panza Verde on Wednesday December 14, 2011 at 5 p.m. Mesón Panza Verde is located on 5^ta Avenida Sur, #19

I’d met Brielle DuFlon a few times before sitting down to interview her for La Cuadra.

“Well, that makes sense,” she said. “So am I.”

DuFlon noticed my hesitation and said, “And, yes, that’s the look I normally get when I tell people I’m from here. Then they ask me how.”

She laughs.

“I explain to them that my impeccable American accent comes from having spent the last six years living in the United States and speaking English at home. I have roots in both North and Central America. But Guatemala is my home.”

She continued, “Growing up, the people around me usually had darker skin than mine. Physically, I was very different. I am a minority in this country, and sometimes I feel like an impostor. Or, rather, I feel as though I might not be welcome to share all of the parts of the culture. But I consider myself a Latin-American artist more than an American artist. I find myself wanting to paint many of the same images as they do — the colors, the fruits, the figures, the angels, the devils, the textiles and the communal spaces. I hope others see me that way, or get to see me that way, eventually.”

Brielle DuFlon, whose parents are also Caucasian-Latin-American artist, has long lived in between any number of worlds. And it is to her great credit that she has developed a visual language which allows her free range of expression in them all.

Selected here are images from two distinct periods in DuFlon’s career. The woodcuts and stone lithographs were completed while working in the United States. The woodcuts, specifically, were exhibited in a show entitled, “Running Back,” which DuFlon describes as a “celebration of memory.”

“I tried to confront and explore childhood memories that remained so firmly in mind while others had disappeared completely. I only made six woodcuts, and an edition of six prints for each. I wanted to work in a traditional style, monochromatic and heavily detailed, with every corner as intricate as the center.

“The show was meant to be the sort of thing a child would find interesting, but that could also resonate for an adult. And it did. Adults who came to the gallery shared with me stories of their own, wherein they’d lived similar experiences in some other part of the world. It made me realize how similar we all are, and how much I enjoy provoking that ‘I know exactly what you mean’ feeling in the audience: an image that harkens to some deep emotion that they are convinced is complex and unique, but that has resonance in all of us.”

Speaking further about the earlier work, DuFlon coins an elegant phrase. “Printmaking,” she says, “is a perfect venue for the uncanny.”

“I enjoy making images that are lightly disturbing or dark. They make people think. Also, they are excellent in conveying complexity and thought. Why do you think Goya, Escher and Munch chose this medium so often? Also, I like working in greyscale. It requires you to play in volume, space and shadow. In relief printing, there are few colors, therefore texture and perspective have to make up for the lack of a more varied palette.”

Drawing the conversation to her more recent work, I noted that the newer paintings (absolute explosions of color) are, in some ways, the polar opposite of the monochromatic woodcuts and lithographs.

She corrected me, noting that, while they are more chromatically vibrant, the paintings also are finely detailed from border to border. “There’s a lot going on outside the center of the paintings.”

“But you’re right,” she continued. “I love color. I love mixing colors. At present I’m using oils because of the depth and the softness, the velvety texture of the paints. But I’ve carried over much of the graphic sense from the printmaking.”

Speaking of her upcoming show at La Galería de Panza Verde (5th Avenida Sur, #19, La Antigua), DuFlon becomes engagingly buoyant.

“The show is called, La Equación del Ser (The Equation of Being). There are constants and variables in the construction of the self. There are things  we can’t escape, things we choose to hold on to, things we let go, things we make bigger, things we make smaller. And what we choose to identify, to focus upon, brings us closer with others that choose the same traits.”

“I’ve chosen a surrealist path lately. In surrealism I’m trying to explore the conscious and the subconscious. The idea of the self is abstract, when not explicitly anatomical. It needs to be placed in space to be visually comprehensible. I’m aiming to represent feelings and thoughts as shapes, compartments, absences, colors, skies, symbolic objects and the body itself. We exist in this world both internally and externally. Our dreams, our desires, our physicality, our subconscious, our thoughts, our sexuality are all integral to understanding our relationship with the world and with one another.”

And Brielle DuFlon, who has brilliantly balanced between, and existed within, such different worlds is an excellent guide.

Do not miss this show.

La Equación del Ser is opening at La Galería de Panza Verde on Wednesday October 12, 2011 at 5 p.m. Mesón Panza Verde is located on 5^ta Avenida Sur, #19

Nearly half a century ago Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “The Global Village”

The constant, pixilated stream has blown some of us flat over on our asses. Most of us (at least most of us who are my age or even more blessed by the attendant work of superannuation) understand how to wield the new digital media as a rudimentary tool. I’m trying to cage a metaphor and keep returning to “monkeys at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey.” But adaptation happens quickly in electronic evolution, so if you want to find someone who understands the artistry inherent in the technology now at hand, you only have to aim a few years younger.

Andü Abril is of this world. Her work (full digital compositions, digital collages and digital image-based transformations) utilize the new technology with skill and deftness, but more to the point, her work speaks in content to the interconnectedness of the age. Note that in many of Andü’s images, the central character is a source of growth. Branches (figurative or stylized) grow from the heart, the mind, the sense centers of the body, reaching out, seeking, discovering, exploring.

Andü’s instinctive turn to the metaphor of self as both an independent agent and also a node connected to a larger consciousness recalls to mind McLuhan’s other great aphorism: The Medium is the Message.

The community of digital artists, of which Andü is a part, is not bound by regional styles, nor are they tied to any specific school or tradition. Andü, born in Mexico City, raised in Spain and now living, teaching and creating in Guatemala, is as much a part of the digital art world in Harare or Hanoi as she is here.

And that world is her village. What she and the generation McLuhan predicted 50 years ago will do with this new interconnectedness is yet to be seen, but if we might glean some vague portents from Andü’s art, then there’s hope for this old planet, yet.

Andü lives and works in Guatemala City. To see more of her work, visit her at http://www.facebook.com/andu.abril

Arguably the first aspect of Sergio Valenzuela’s work that strikes the viewer is his choice of palette.

Within the borders of the work, Valenz introduces repeated and yet discordant themes that ride within the colors. He chooses familiar, angular, mechanical objects: chairs, stages, tables, abodes — all of which remain steadfastly empty, as if you’ve come upon the scene too late and all that is left is the tableau and a lingering question.

The only human representation in the paintings are faceless figures, each in some sense of unbalance. Perched upon their wheels or posed inexplicably on a summit, they are the mute chorus of the images, players that wish to explain what has happened, what will happen again — and yet they remain unable to connect with one another or the viewer. They appear somehow in mid-aria without a voice.

From his brush, Valenz’s brings one last recurrent form: the ladder — suggesting at a chance of transcendence or at least a practicable hope of escape.

Valenz is not easy. He is challenging and ruminative. And taken as a whole, his paintings — mechanical forms imprinted, as they are, within the mind and muscle of the human animal — define the edges of a struggle to understand self.

To see more of Sergio Valenzuela’s work, please visit La Antigua Galería del Arte, located at 4a Calle Oriente, #15 or visit their website at www.artintheamericas.com. Mr. Valenzuela lives and works in Guatemala.

I recently visited the artist and designer, Mario Lanz, at his home.

Mario and I were discussing his art in preparation for this issue of La Cuadra. He made reference by noting that de Bono believed the two main activators of change are “accidents and a sense of humor,” because both allow you to see the world in a different perspective. “De Bono makes the obvious point that we only laugh at the end of a joke, once we hear the punchline. And we laugh, what is funny, is that we trace the thought backwards until we understand the context. Then we see something new that wasn’t there before. We are surprised by ourselves.”

Later in the conversation Mario spoke of simplicity as a virtue in human communication by referencing someone I’d never before thought of as an artist. “Take someone we all know,” Mario said, “Jesus Christ. I think of Jesus as an artist, a designer. His message was simple, but through his art, his parables, that message became memetic. Viral. It was Jesus the Artist, Jesus the Designer that spread simple truths to the world. And in that way, anyone can change the world.”

Taken together these two observations give a reasonable vantage to appreciate the art and design of Mario Lanz. With humor and a sense of play, Mario aims to shed light on some human truths. As such, his work requires little, if any, explication. His visual commentaries on modernity, humanity, sexuality and emotion are meant to tease the viewer into reflection. With Mario, first comes the laugh, then the thought, then a sense of revelation.

I posed to Mario a question: If the Christ Message is as simple as love and peace, what was his message? He corrected me, “Love and peace are complex. The art is finding a way to make them simple. My message . . . is ‘let the child come to me.’ That’s what I try to do in my art and my life. Let my own child play.”

To see some of Mario’s work, drop by Y Tu Piña También on the corner of 1st Ave and 6th Calle in Antigua. You might find him there as well. Playing. For those of you outside of Antigua, drop us an email at lacuadramagazine@gmail.com and we’ll put you in touch with Mario.

Accidently born in the United States, intentionally raised in Brazil and Mexico,

From our conversations, we gather that Gg’s worldview dances with her politics somewhere near the hopeful intersection of Socialism and Buddhism. In her words, Gg expected to find, in Cuba, “. . . people living contentedly, maybe like a middle class. Perhaps a bit on the poor side, but with what they need. I expected to find people, you know, working for the common good.”

While that Cuba may exist somewhere, it is not what Gg found in Old Havana.

Over the years La Cuadra has had many friends who have traveled to Cuba with equally powerful preconceptions.  Some, like Gg, expected to see a shining beacon to the rest of Latin America; others expected the glowering, Orwellian nightmare of a Stalinist State reflected in every eye. That seems to be the way with Cuba, an unintentionally anachronistic island floating in the 21st Century Caribbean Sea, yet cut adrift from the ideological moorings that defined its modern history. Cuba, to most of the rest of the world, has become an argument rather than a living nation. And that is a great tragedy in and of itself.

To her credit, Gg didn’t try to conjure the Cuba she wanted to see. Rather, she photographed the one she found, just a few blocks away from the Malecón or the Plaza de Armas, and by doing so she captured something of the reality and the complexity of Cuban life.

Without further commentary, here is a selection of those images.

For those of you currently in Antigua, more of Gg’s work is on display (and for sale) at one of La Cuadra’s favorite new restaurants in town, AngieAngie, located on the corner of 1a Avenida Sur and 6th Calle, just a few doors south of Café No Sé.

More of her work can be found online at: http://www.thebiggerpicturepictures.com/

Throughout the 1980s,

Jean-Marie Simon was one of those very few journalists who chose to live here, and in 1987 she published, Guatemala: Eternal Spring / Eternal Tyranny (W.W. Norton & Co.) The book is a moving and enigmatic presentation, often in the form of short vignettes of text and image that give the reader the sensation that the war, itself, is growing around them from a thousand different points in time and space. Reading this book is as important to understanding the Guatemala Civil War as reading The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman is to understanding how its howling still echoes down canyons of impunity to this very day.

In June of this year, for the first time, the book was published in Spanish and is finally available to a wider Guatemalan audience. La Cuadra was fortunate enough to secure an interview with Ms. Simon about her experiences living in Guatemala during the war, and the creation of a book which captures those years in ways that no other work has done.

—–

MT: Jean-Marie Simon, welcome and congratulations on the re-publication, in Spanish for the first time, of your book, Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny.

JMS: Thank you, I am glad to be here.

MT: To start, I have a direct question: were you a reporter during the time that you were writing the book?

JMS: Yes. There were lots of us here. There were many good reporters here, but the problem is that most of them just came and went. For example, Marjorie Miller of the L.A. Times, who I consider a great reporter, she couldn’t spend a month in Guatemala.

MT: Right, helicopter in, helicopter out.

JMS: Well, yes, but her helicoptering in was good. There would be these pilgrimages to Guatemala for elections and coups, and every once in a while, if something bad happened, they’d arrive en masse from the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. They’d do their interview with the Commander of some region. Maybe they’d go up to Nebaj for two days. But as a photographer and journalist that just didn’t attract me.

As I said last night [at an event celebrating the book's release], I started out just wanting to be a photographer, a great photographer. I wanted to be a big name and go from place to place and shake the world with my images; then I got sucked into Guatemala. And I decided, while I wanted to be great, it’s more about being useful. I thought, well, I speak Spanish. I can talk to people and I’m a pretty good photographer and I learned to be a good listener to people here. They’re such good storytellers. But I decided that my utility was combining the photographs with testimony because I was hearing much more than I could express in a photograph.

And the reason I was hearing it was because Aryeh Neier, who was with Americas Watch, which became Human Rights Watch, learned that I was in Guatemala and that I was talking to people and there were no reporters here long term. So he put me to work writing reports on Guatemala, and I started to enjoy interviewing people. And then it became an identity crisis. Do I take the picture? Do I photograph people? And the photographs probably suffered for it because, maybe, I could have taken the photography to another level if I’d just stuck with that and jettisoned the interviews, but it just wasn’t that useful to do that here. Beautiful pictures of a war are not going to do much for a country. But reporting, I think, did.

So I wrote Human Rights Watch reports on Guatemala from 1982 to 1987. And after some time there were so many people showing up in my hotel room, my little hotel room on 6th Avenue and 12th Street in Guatemala City, which is now a narco-hotel. I lived there for six years. And people would come to my hotel. Peasants aren’t going to go look for you in Zone 10.  But they will look for you in Zone 1. Because they get off the bus where the terminal used to be in Zone 4 and then they’d walk to my hotel. And Zone 1 was such a melting pot of people that they’d fit in, and they’d come up to my room, bring a coffee and we’d talk.

MT: And they’d seek you out because they knew you were there and they knew you were telling their stories?

JMS: They really trusted me because they knew who I was working for. And it was like a chain effect where someone trusted me, and then they told their friends and they told their friends and so on.

MT: Okay, so here’s the reason I asked if you were reporting during the war: you were a known entity in Guatemala. The positive side being people came to seek you out, looking for somewhere to tell their story. The other side is that the military knew who you were, too. Did you ever feel threatened? Was your life ever in danger?

As noted by an earlier reviewer of his work, Silvia Herrera, the faces Barrios paints “chase the image” of the subject that inspired the work. That may be the key.

While representational, these images are also deeply suggestive of the emotional ties that unite us all. The paintings, be they watercolors or oils, “chase” the deeper truths of what it is to be human. In them we see deep melancholy, a reverence for a past long gone, and yet still living in our most silent and cloistered inner chambers. We witness an adoration of the beauty that resides within – and gives form to – all life, be it our own or the fading representational color of the plucked flower or the bird on the wing. These are the stones his work touches, and these are the stones he makes sing in a harmony beyond the mundane.

Surely, there are as many uniting themes of our collective existence less beautiful – avarice, hoarding, anger and hatred. And as such, Barrios’ work points us to the inherency of the choice: In what light shall we see one another?

To see more of Cesar Barrios’ work, please visit www.artintheamericas.com.

While speaking recently with Daniel Chauche

Yesterday, upon the stair / I met a man who wasn’t there / He wasn’t there again today / I wish, I wish he’d go away…

Only with Daniel, of course, I wish, I wish he’ll choose to stay.

Chauche, to some extent in person and evocatively in his work, seems to fade in and out of the frame. At once, he is patiently explaining what his art is, but doing so by taking away layers of what it is not. During a recent conversation he said his work was “documentary photography” but then quickly refined the comment by saying it was “personal photography in a documentary style – not National Geographic, not crime scene investigator, not reportage” though it uses some of the same techniques. Then there was an instructive foray into the history of photography, and where his form fits into the development of the field in time and place. Then the conversation turned to what he hopes will be the historical importance of his whole collection of images, created over three decades of life in Guatemala that provide a unique visual memory of the country and its people during his time here.

I understood him perfectly, and then I didn’t. And then I did. Yesterday upon a stair, I met a man who wasn’t there…

To explain his art, Daniel can point to the significant subtext in any photograph which ties the image to its place in time and space – the indicators that reveal, to use his term, the “it-ness” of the image. By way of one complex example, consider the last image in the gallery at the bottom of this page. It is a photograph of a cemetery, beautifully balanced with a symbolic tree of life rising above a mid-field horizon line. But the “it-ness” of the photograph only comes clear if you know the significance of the dates (early 1982) and what that era meant in the history of Guatemala (a time of unrelenting violence and war) and that the double XX’s on the grave markers mean that the bodies could not be identified. Then might your eyes be drawn to the other crosses with the double XX’s disappearing into the background of the graveyard and sense the image’s it-ness.

But at the same time, Chauche has no desire to own your “Aha!” moment. He has plenty of his own at work and in the world, with his camera. And as he collects and creates images, he brings to his audience his own personal experience – experiences that the viewer can feel, standing alone in the gallery. And when he’s created his art, framed and represented his subject,  one feels as if you are seeing the world through the photographer’s lens, and yet also, very much through your own eyes. The realization of that shared experience between the artist, the subject, the history and the viewer is the root of the there / not there paradox. Oddly and inspiringly, you also get the sense that this means you, too. The woman with the child on her hip is not there. Nor are you. The man with the lottery tickets is not there. Nor are you. Death as a costumed  dancer is not there. Nor are you. And yet you all are – in a place out of time and space. Chauche is the conduit. It’s a rather Antigonish experience.

To explain further his philosophy of personal photography in a documentary style Daniel compared his work to a novel written so well that the reader forgets that it’s just words on a page. When that happens you are fully in the writer’s world. As we looked over images in his home, that was, for me, the “Aha!” moment.

Then, of course, Daniel changed the metaphor and said that maybe his photographs are better understood as poems. Words that, properly few in number and well chosen, somehow speak to a truth of extraordinary depth and substance. Again, that is a way of understanding the “it-ness” of the image or of the words. I thought I had him at the first metaphorical turn, but my understanding deepened with the second  reference. He wasn’t there again today.

To turn rather crassly from the inter-connectedness of images to history, and narrative to visual philosophy, you should be there to view his work personally. The artist is presenting a show that focuses on the Panchoy Valley and its inhabitants for the Sol del Río Gallery at Mesón Panza Verde located on 5a Avenida in Antigua, #19. The show opens on January 13th at 5 PM and runs through early February.

You will see Daniel there. Maybe…

Julio Zadik’s story is equally as intriguing

But just as it seemed that the sensitivity of his eye would elevate him to international fame, he – quite intentionally – disappeared.

To be fair, Zadik didn’t disappear from his family nor his life; rather he focused his avocational energies on lithography and assembling an impressive gallery of modern art in Bogota, Colombia.

Yet he never stopped shooting.

Upon his death earlier in this decade, he bequeathed to his family tens of thousands of images he had captured or created over a lifetime, some of which will be on display at the Sol del Rio Gallery in Panza Verde this month.

The photos for this show were taken between 1937 and 1965, and their existence is causing a rewriting of Latin  American modern art. At a time when most photographers were bound to their studios, and most interaction between Ladino and indigenous cultures was economically and socially exploitative – and strictly ethnographic academically – Julio Zadik went into the field and touched the physical and spiritual humanity of his nation.

Panza Verde is located on 5th Avenue, just south of 9th Calle. The opening will be held at 4PM on Saturday December 12, and will run until early January.

Zadik Athletic Males

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