Othón Téllez and the Order of Painting.

By César Villanueva

Do artists understand where Goliath stands these days?  The claim for the “end of painting” arrives in a global world where business ethos and the illusions of radical pragmatism permeate the visual arts.  It is not strange that neoconservative young artists brained-stuffed with a neo-liberal jargon, uncritically accept the premises of the new corporate/institutional patrons. What is at stake is not the relevance of the painting form in itself but who gets to say what art can be. This is a symbolic cultural struggle where a group of “neoconservative artists”(art-neocons) intend to assault art museums, co-opt producers of cultural capital, and appoint the managers of the institutional infrastructure, all of this as a prerequisite to meet their petty goal: to legitimate symbolically the taste of a bureaucracy/ nuveaux-riche global elite.

This brief assessment is not blind to the many times oppressive institutions and practices that have traditionally governed the arts in the past, including the painters’ mafias, the tyrannical market taste materialized in conservative galleries, and the often retarded art saloons and boring biennales. However, in the shift from the visual arts to the art-neocons’ credo (the end-of-painting equals the end-of-history: remember F. Fukuyama?), painting is often secluded and mostly represented as a “subnormal deviant case” in the arts –bizarre as it may appear. This strategy masks the art-neocons attack which is nothing but a distorted rhetorical political strategy under the guise of “new” art. Neoconservative mentality in the arts is a combination of a hyper-egotistical soul with an infatuated greediness, multiplied by a flagrant ignorance of their subject matter-art. The “upwardly mobile” discursive artists and curators of the new millennium are trying to reformulate a vulgar version of a philistine tradition: art=ego-money-blasé.

Thus, the deceptive declaration “painting is dead” is one of the most flagrant examples of cultural neoconservative ideology at-work in the arts today. This dogmatic creed bestows five basic adjectives embedded in a single assumption for its reasoning: painting became uninteresting, narrow, ineffective, over-academic and especially –they insist– obsolete. In order to bite-the-bait presented by these “naïf post-pictorialists” the main requirements are precisely to be ignorant of the socio-historical relevance of painting in the Western culture, and to be part of the neoconservative “money-festo.” It is clear that painting is not only part of the living cultural heritage of the West, but also painting is indeed the visual identity of people, nations and nowadays global regions. In response to the frivolous art-neocons’ attack I insist that most contemporary pictorial movements are vivid, relevant and current. Are the artists themselves aware of this? Do David know where he stands?

In order to make my case, I bring as an example the paintings of Mexican Neo-CoBrA expressionist artist Othón Téllez. The point of departure for Othón’s creative pictorial life is to be seen through the influence of CoBrA expressionism, post-war political ideology and Latin American popular elements, both in culture & nature. These three aspects are intertwined throughout the work of his life-history painting, but they are by no means, the product of random circumstances. It’s rather the contrary: he comes from a family of accomplished musicians, which undoubtedly influenced his taste for rhythm, composition, and abstraction. Secondly, during his young years as an artist he took a political stand leaning towards a critical reflection of social change, especially in the murkiest authoritarian times of Mexican politics during the late sixties and early seventies. Finally, his work exhibits a conscious will to grasp thematic and pictorial elements from the local/popular and the global/cosmopolitan –paradoxes of contemporary México– either through the cultural products or by a reference to the visual environment.

What makes Othón Téllez’ production a relevant case in the contemporary art world is his method which I call “The Order of Painting”. This comes, as you may guess, from Michel Foucault’s ideas when discussing the Chinese encyclopedia imagined by Jorge Luis Borges. The role of the creative possibilities available for the artist stands in relation to the liberties one can handle ―and be responsible for. In this case, Othón Téllez has chosen to divide his conceptions into specific painting ideas: a) Crossword puzzles, b) The obscurity of the sea and its secrets, c) Open spaces, d) The eyes of the maguey, d) A blast, e) Sacrifice, f) The Genesis of the Sun, g) The cayman and the moon, h) Le sacre du printemps, i) From sea to earth, j) Insinuations, k) The great sun bath, l) And this is the way the serpent fertilized the earth, m) Urion waiting, n) Hechizo under spell o) Environment, and p) The door of Kiev.

This classification system is significant, I argue, because of the diaphanous impossibility of conceiving it. On the other hand, it stands out independently from what we actually see inside his visual work. The Order of Painting Othón Téllez suggests grants freedom to our own rationality and understanding of the world. His painting renders an alien way of organizing experience, which is both hallucinogenic and anti-instrumental, and thus confronts us with the ways our arbitrary rules work for pigeonholing reality. His inconceivable sets of categories occupy an epistemological space that is prior to thought, and rely completely on the power of the painting-matter as the main fulfilling force. And here lies the importance of his work: he, as a visual artist, refuses to subordinate vision and image to speech. His painting demarcates a clear line outside the realms of the discursive arts. What we see in Othón Téllez' work is at one level, “painting in the service of painting” but also, painting in the service of autonomy and freedom. By suggesting an original wide-open range of figures, associations and colors inside the paintings, Othón Téllez sparks a post-hoc pictorial debate, where the illusions of logical representation, visual story-telling, and form causation are called into question. Pictorially, these spaces are masterfully occupied by entities that take their place in a world, which is at times a pure abstraction, but often figurative, and rather frequently, a solution on the verge. In any case, the free arrangements between color and form on the one hand, and composition and expression on the other, are the obvious achievements of his visual art reflection.
 
Othón Téllez’ pictorial artifacts (literally: facts of art), are not only an antithesis of the new feudal arts policy “lust of the eyes” (lt. concupiscentia oculorum) represented by the art-neocons, but also a natural affirmation of the right to liberate sight (lt. contemplatio). This “freedom to contemplate” can be attested in what I believe is one of Othón Tellez’ best series: Crossword puzzles I. Masterfully arranged, the monumental poliptic integrating the 29 wooden panels (80 X 80 cms.) flow on the walls freely, just as each piece finds its place in the vibrant painting quasi-mural assemblage in a mixed technique lined with thin sheets of gold leafs. What conform the whole visual puzzle is not only a well-balanced deployment of equilibrated abstraction with the instinctive forces of expressionism but also an invitation to subvert our traditional way of looking at paintings. The challenge to the viewer is to make him/her participate in the construction of a whole unique piece by locating and relocating the order of each painting as they like, deselecting or incorporating the forms and colors available in the 29-piece crossroad puzzle. Even when the pieces were painted to be all in association, they have a freewheeling spirit in their conceptions that give each one its own visual identity.  The energy of the art emerges from its embedded doctrine that I can summarize as the complete freedom of expression with the main emphasis placed on color and brush, and a will to free the individual, enslaved by aesthetic prohibitions and impotence, just as in the original CoBrA creed of Danish Asger Jorn or Dutch  Karel Appel and Corneille. The subtle political implications are part of the artistic strategy: betting on a social engagement against status-quo, and the eroding myth of the “artistic genius,” this exhibition induces us to reflect upon the vision of a Mexican artist traveling countries up north and down south, where the structures of development and underdevelopment become blunt obvious. The Crossroad puzzles are evidences of critical circumnavigations that organize experience and then traduces this into artistic knowledge, a reflection of systems of dominance, influence and conceptions of the world: from México City to Houston, back to Veracruz and then to Caracas, back to Guanajuato then To NYC, back to Oaxaca then to Madrid… Artist at sea…Mexican at home… an artist overseas… a Mexican in Latin America… An artist centered… A Mexican de-centered… Crossroad puzzles.

Othón Téllez’ art also draws from the CoBrA seminal influence in his search for images appearing on the canvas as naturally and quickly as possible. However, in his Crossroad puzzles he deviates from the CoBrA tradition in his avoidance of a childlike mannerism and darker, stormy colors, and recurring instead to the Mexican and Latin American popular and colorful schema. His preference for the abstraction in this series does not rule out other paintings where (semi) figurative landscapes, flora or people are privileged. What we see in this art is an elegant blend of traditions that make his work a germinal visual creation where mastery of the technique is central to the quality the work.

Othón Téllez’ art reminds us that mankind is the only subject for which the painting is made for. Humans are the origin and purpose of cultural products and painting is an exceptional example of how our experiences, identities and ideas are visually embedded to represent what we are about as people. The pictorial ride Othón Tellez invite us is also a challenge to provoke other artists as well: Can we still liberate creativity from the socio-institutional structural values through which we are conditioned to enter the arts? Can visual artists promote in his art the awakening of a newly visual freedom, as a sign of an authentic human condition?
 
The Order of Painting Othón Téllez proposes is a visual assertion that there is hope and trust. This show is a confirmation that “painting is well and alive” but it is also a testimony to the fact that the aggressive approach of the neocons has not yet established its hegemony. And that artistic creativity today and in the future, like in the past, has a dynamic where imagination and innovation keeps mutating in a reaction against the dogmatic tendency of debilitating and speculative market forces/institutions. In this sense Othón Téllez carries the tradition of the CoBRa painters beyond its own original limits, because he brings the spirit of his Latin American heritage and potentiality, in an expressionist flux where globalization is paying a toll to de-Center what was originally a local European phenomenon only. And this is now the crossroad puzzle in the visual arts.

César Villanueva Rivas es Doctor en Ciencia Política con especialidad en Diplomacia y Cultura por la Universidad de Växjö, Suecia. Cursó dos maestrías, una en Gobierno y Políticas Públicas con especialidad en Política Cultural y Administración de las Artes por la Universidad de Washington en Seattle, EUA (1997) y otra en Artes Visuales por la Academia de San Carlos, ENAP-UNAM (1995). Ha impartido cursos y conferencias de Cultura, Arte Mexicano y Contemporáneo y diplomacia Cultural en distintas universidades de México, Escandinavia, Europa, Norte y Sudamérica. Miembro del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores Nivel I. Es Editor del libro Relational Strategies: Relational Art towards the 20th Century, por la VXU Press, la UIA y la UDLA-Puebla (2008, en imprenta). Es co-autor del libro, La Encrucijada del Bienestar: Política, Economía y Cultura, (UNAM 2008). En el 2007 publicó su tesis doctoral Representing Cultural Diplomacy en Suecia (VXU press), donde mantiene fuertes lazos académicos y de investigación. Finalmente, cuenta con once artículos y capítulos en publicaciones nacionales e internacionales arbitrados, en revistas especializadas y libros. A la par de su actividad académica, ha trabajado como promotor cultural en México y el extranjero. Actualmente es investigador y profesor de tiempo completo en la Universidad Iberoamericana, A.C.