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Work: Rainbow
Mixed technique on cardboard (70x50 cm) Year 2000
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Beloming to the series "The Height of Your Courage"
Mixed technique on cardboard (64x64 cm) Year 2000
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This is the phrase that presides over
the entrance to Arnaldo Larrinaga's studio, in the quarter of Lawton,
Havana City. After knowing his work, I reaffirm my conviction that
when painting becomes a need and a claim of the spirit, when in
the groundwork of creation is the genuine talent, then the human
work does not die and man remains for ever in the artist.
I can say that I had the privilege of enjoying his self-portrait
twice: the first, on canvas, in a series of six suggesting paintings;
the other, a literary one and that I present to you in some of his
fundamental aspects:
"I used to paint with my grandmother in a space of 50 cm.
I know what poverty and the lack of materials mean, because when
I have to say something, the land is enough. I knew the language
of the poor material and that of the good one: the small space and
the large one. Basically I need to give: I'm a faithful lover of
life and all what I do is under the sign of love. I do not compromise
with art.
"I grew up in this humble neighborhood where I became a man.
Here I cried and laughed, sold pop corns, shone shoes, sold ice,
clear and arrange gardens...; I love these persons that inspired
my life and my work. I grant my art fundamentally to them."
These biographical notes are enough for the person who is eager
to know the spiritual and plastic world of this painter that considers
himself "eternally" young, because for him youth is a
sign of energy and vitality, ruptures, searches and transformations,
of rendering to contemporaneity.
Larrinaga's plastic work has gone through different stages where
styles, themes, life experience and motivations have been conjugated,
always centering around the same axis: the man. In this way, different
series of paintings, expressions, each one, portraying a better
moment of his artistic career were being shaped.
The Antilles, Light and Color
The fact that he belonged to Grupo Antillano in the 1960's, a group
made up of active artists who were concerned with the phenomenon
of identity and its solution, led by the great master Wifredo Lam,
opened up an aesthetic and researching line that he performed in
further series.
 Toward
1966 in the midst of the Viet Nam war, he began dealing with this
topic: it was in this time when "Consecuencias de la guerra"
(Consequences of War) emerged. The works of this brief time were
just a few, made as a response to a given political and social reality.
The exotic and Antillean world with its mysteries, fabulous mythology,
typical flora and very specially with its people was being opened
with the strong suggestive charge of a horizon that has been little
explored in the world of plastic arts. So those features related
to the national identity and the Cuban culture in general ranked
to a first level in his work. This new world that he wanted to portray
demanded a rigorous research process and he began reading the works
written by Fernando Ortiz and other prestigious researchers who
made him got acquainted with ethnology and folklore.
This can be regarded as a moment of formal and conceptual refinement
where a code of images is sought that will allow him to convey his
interests linked to the Cuban identity and beyond that, the Caribbean
one.
The Warlock Blacks
This series is made up of paintings largely inspired in his
literary readings; also they are the results of his studies on the
works of universal painters, especially of whom he regards his master:
Wifredo Lam, whose influence contributed to shape his ideas on the
paintings; but, above all, the works of this stage are an original
product that extensively shows his artistic talent. Larrinaga has
been working on them nearly 20 years (from 1975 to 1994). His work
begins to have other figures, other codes and to be slowly transformed.
"To search in the interior of man, to direct the route toward
his real identity was always my main concern." That is why
the human eye with all its symbolic charge is the reiterated motivation
of his paintings where the African-Cuban topic is seen in a plastic
context characterized by the dark colors (black, golden and ocher)
which are joined in a superior and expressive synthesis of a particular
atmosphere.
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From to the series "Mujer y naturalea"
Mixed technique on cardboard (81x65 cm) Year 1996
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From to the series "Birds"
Mixed technique on cardboard (92x64 cm) Year 2000
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Beloming to the series "The Height of Your Courage"
Mixed technique on cardboard (64x64 cm) Year 2000
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Beloming to the series "The Height of Your Courage"
Mixed technique on cardboard (64x64 cm) Year 1996
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Searching a White Space
It represents the climax of his searches. The alliance between
abstract and figurative elements based on an expressionist concept
and the level of synthesis achieved, provides to this set of paintings,
a value of special suggestion. In the center of all the work is man,
as has been suggesting since the very beginning. "Now I'm not
only concerned with the problem of identity in the social field, I
go further on, toward a more intimate level, spiritual, existentialist.
White for me is not the synonym of absence, but on the contrary, is
reanimation, a consequence of my obsessive search for pureness and
of the essential value of the human being."It is a leap toward
another dimension, toward the representation of man in his wide generic
sense; his trace becomes then the raison d'être of his plastic
work: concepts, colors, textures, addition of new techniques join
this search to which he adds all the emotional charge and the plastic-philosophical
language of intimacy.
The Height of His Size
It is the artistic synthesis of his obsession for height; a
challenge to the real possibilities man has to raise above his weaknesses.
Here this emblematic space in white is raised as a lei motiv, surrounding
a whole where "my urgent need to deliver myself to the people"
lies. Now the canvas lives with bright colors that reach unique
and original shades; the most capricious contrasts and shapes are
stressed. Also Larrinaga achieves a superior level of synthesis
which makes the message more suggestive while the conquests made
on the texture is turned unpredictable.
The Big Space
Other independent series and paintings make up this panorama
as "Mujer y naturaleza (Woman and Nature), "Los misterios
del mar" (The Mysteries of the Sea), "Aves" (Birds)
and "La crucifixion" (The Crucifixion). Paintings of a
great conceptual and plastic strength where the combination of shades,
contrasts and the use of different textural elements (stone, soil,
sand and cigar) make up the stylistic special values of the whole.
Arnaldo Larrinaga's exhibitions and personal success in over 10
countries in Europe and the Americas and the multiple recognition
received, ratify the true authentic values of his artistic production.
Today he knows that he has all the physical space to paint, that
of his neighborhood, his country "too vast for my feet to walk
all over," but also the space of the universe, "which
is what enables me to do this work of man's trace and at the height
of man.
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