December 18, 2009
Carmen Herrera, Art Nexus
Carmen Herrera at IKON Gallery - London/England - Reviews
By CARMEN JULIÁ – The first European exhibition of works by Cuban artist Carmen Herrera has undoubtedly been one of the big surprises in this laconic British summer – for many, the discovery of the year. The show, organized by Ikon Gallery, proposes a detailed journey through the fifty-plus year career of this largely unknown artist, reaching all the way to her most recent work.
In this journey we discover an art characterized by this formal synthesis and its chromatic intensity, attributes that grow in importance over the years. While the earliest works that open the show are marked by Surrealist-like lyrical quality, as for instance in Coquete de l’air (1950), soon we are witnessing the substitution of the organic shapes abundant in those canvases with a series of compositions, like Discurso cromático (1948) o Jardin verde (1950), that follow a rational structure in which different color planes alternate creating rhythms and cadences emphasized through the incorporation of angular shapes. These works, literally rescued from oblivion by the show’s curator, Nigel Prince, confirm how significantly influenced Herrera was by her contact with Concrete and Neo-Concrete Art during her time in Paris in the late 1940s, and attest to her experiments with concrete shapes that retain, even today, the freshness, energy, and urgency that accompanies any search for a language of one’s own.
The formal rhythms and chromatic combinations that characterize her first incursions into concrete painting are later simplified and softened into simple geometric shapes – triangle, square, rectangle – and combinations of one or two colors with black and white. During her years in Paris, Herrera began to experiment with compositions in black and white that toyed with the format and with the boundaries imposed by the canvas. In the early 1950’s, she produced a series of formal solutions that pioneer what was later to be know as Op Art, as can be seen in works like Negro y Blanco (1952). These black and white compositions became a recurring element in the artist’s work, and for this occasion have been grouped together in the same space. For Herrera, after working with excessive colors such as oranges, greens, and yellows, these works in black and white signified a flight from color, a kind of chromatic purge or depuration.
In 1954, after her Parisian sojourn, Herrera moved to New York. There she found an artistic landscape that had nothing to do with the precise contours and flat colors she had known in Europe. In a New York dominated by Abstract Expressionist, some years had to pass before artists like Ellsworth Kelly or the geometric minimalism of the young Frank Stella started to impose their clean-cut shapes and “fresh from the tube” colors. In this context, it is surprising that Herrera’s work, despite having experimented with the same compositional arrangements and arrived at similar formal conclusions later reached by other artist, was not included in the enthusiasm that surrounded that wave of American painters. Herrera blames the rejection on the part of the artistic community she experienced on her arrival in New York on the lack of interest generated by the work of a woman in an art scene clearly dominated by male presences.
Seeing canvases like Rojo con triángulo blanco (1961), Blanco y verde (1966-67), or Amarillo (1971) – where the artist experiments with the limits of the canvas, introducing emptiness into her composition – it is beyond comprehension that her work remained in oblivion for such long time. The intensity of her colors and the simplicity of her shapes, pointed straight to the retina, refer us insistently to the basic elements of painting, to aesthetic experience as a purely visual experience, and to the pleasure it provides. Throughout her career, Herrera never abandoned concrete shapes – shapes that, as she later explained, originate in her desire to express ”something that cannot be said with words and that I express using lines and colors.” Indeed, words do not do justice to the visual intensity concentrated in each of her canvases; her painting is revealed as a supreme exercise in synthesis through which the artist built a world of shapes and colors that, as she puts it was “too simple for some, but sufficient for me.”