Luis Hernández Cruz: Abstraction at Liberty

Federica Palomero

Director of Museology, Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas

Curator of Latin American Art

2003

A museum’s fundamental function is to bring together, in a place for which they were never conceived, works which were never meant to be brought together. And a one-artist exhibit simply concentrates that role, bringing together the works of a single artist. Here, in the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, pieces that followed their own destiny as they left the artist’s studio are now artificially brought face to face again, but out of this artificiality comes a natural thread of continuity that tells a story –in this case, the story of more than four decades of creation by a Puerto Rican artist, Luis Hernández Cruz.

This sort of exhibit is not an inventory, but rather a selection of pieces filtered through a narrative lens. It allows the curator to privilege some themes, emphasize some forms, even some color, and perhaps downplay other aspects. One reading is favored over a number of possible readings, especially in the case of an artist as prolific as Hernández Cruz, whose works lend themselves to a wide variety of interpretations. It also gives us the opportunity to return to the works themselves, over and above (but not altogether ignoring) any critiques that they inspired over the years, and perhaps to throw new light on them.

The corpus of Hernández Cruz’s works spans many years (from 1959 to 2002), and it is both numerous and varied, for Hernández Cruz is a restless artist, who seeks, experiments, reflects on his own work and his natural, cultural, and national surroundings, and takes upon himself the role of artist not just anywhere, but specifically in Puerto Rico.

One story can be seen immediately in this group of works: the relationship that the artist has had with figuration and abstraction, concepts that indeed he goes beyond, seeking other definitions. Although there are totally abstract pieces, with no concrete outside referent, there are none that are entirely figurative, and most of the works range between the two poles, within a new category that eliminates that now-invalid dichotomy in favor of a fusion, a synthesis. Out of this mixture come relationships with the Island’s nature, its light and atmosphere, underlying reminiscences, its cultural legacies and possessions, with technology, and finally, with the idioms of other artists, and these relationships situate Hernández Cruz beyond Puerto Rico, in the tradition of the Caribbean and Latin America as a whole. 

Beginnings

In 1959, Luis Hernández Cruz painted Niños con morrales. It is a work that was still transitional, in which there were elements that the artist soon left behind: clear figuration, an almost anecdotic subject matter, the effect of depth, an atmosphere of fleeting vision created by snippets and tatters of color. Among those which continued and strengthened: a budding ability to synthesized, a taste for high contrast (between two primary colors, red and blue, that were later to be seen in a painting such as Danza ritual, 1980), and a self-assurance in the handling of the plastic elements. We should note that these elements, stripped of all academicism, came from a tradition of modern art that was foreign, even contrary, to the dominant aesthetic in Puerto Rico at the time: impeccable technique and social realism. In that context, the young Hernández Cruz’s work symbolized a questioning and a break, for in the sixties prominent artists such as Augusto Marín, Osiris Delgado, and Félix Rodríguez Báez were still faithfully following the traditional aesthetic, which co-existed uneasily with the avant-garde in Puerto Rico.

Not finding in hos own surroundings any incentive for creating a new idiom, the young artist looked outside, as had, but a few years earlier, two other pioneers of Puerto Rican abstract art –Olga Albizu and Julio Rosado del Valle. Hernández Cruz’s biographers all note that the explosive catalyst for his later work was a trip to the United States in 1959 (the year he painted Niños con morrales), and unquestionably there did occur if not a revelation at least the confirmation of the validity of his artistic ambitions and his desire to contribute to a renewal, an opening on his Island. His first fully abstract works were related more naturally, more organically, however, to the Lyrical Abstraction and Art informel that grew from their European roots (in France and Spain) into Latin America in the late fifties, where an underground presence of landscape, glimmers of ethereal nature, the stamp of “the earth”, a delight in matter, the sensuality of texture were elements shared by artists across the continent: Guillermo Wiedemann and Juan Antonio Roda in Colombia’; Luisa Richter and Francisco Hung in Uruguay; Oscar Pantoja in Bolivia; Clorindo Testa and Sarah Grilo in Argentina.

More than reciprocal influences, this was a case of a spiritual and aesthetic community, a not-so-secret society that had coalesced around its members’ yearning to define in forms, colors, a particular sensibility, what might be called “our America” –the America in Spanish of Luis Rafael Sánchez.

In Después de la lluvia en Toro Negro, 1961, those desires and ambitions took convincing form: it was a work that affirmed abstraction at the same time it allowed the spectator to glimpse –in its horizontal composition, its plays of reflections and mirror-images, its delicate equilibrium of masses and atmospheres– the memory of a sense of communion with nature. Hernández Cruz revealed himself here to be a painter sensitive to atmospheric elements, a painter in the tradition of Canaletto, Turner, the Impressionists, and the Puerto Rican Francisco Oller. There were still bits and pieces of “reality” under the artistic expression founded on pure chromatic and material pleasure, and that persistence of the real in the image freed from representation was to be a major feature of Luis Hernández Cruz’s painting at almost every stage of his career.

Después de la lluvia en Toro Negro offered art in Puerto Rico –a land with a great tradition of landscape painting– a new form, a new way of doing landscape, in that it shifted the very meaning of the painting from description or interpretation to re-creation (in terms of formal equivalences), and did so with a firm, self-assured idiom. It was, without doubt, a manifesto-painting.

Informalism

The term is a comfortable one, for it refers to a “school” of art that is well known and locatable in time, and to which Hernández Cruz belongs very naturally. The term may not be entirely “correct” or precise; in fact, its vagueness embraces a number of very diverse tendencies. But it has the advantage of siting its representatives within an international avant-garde, a position that made Hernández Cruz a pioneer in Puerto Rico, for he broke the boundaries of a local an “localistic” art that had been entrenched in a somewhat reductive notion of national identity (limited to the exaltation of natural beauty, the chronicling of native or indigenous customs, and social protest) and on the appropriation, within the anthropophagic tradition of Latin American art, of a worldwide idiom which at the time was “avant-garde”: a very personal, very Puerto Rican way of being abstract.

In 1964-65, Hernández Cruz came to that point that we might call “total abstraction”, a purely formal experimentation, almost craftmanlike in its refinement, in the way it made every work a process more than a finished object. Collage, with the freedom given it by the artist, was a favorite medium in those early works in which two-dimensionality and the effects of color and texture were the prevailing elements. In Qatrat (1965, Illus. I), the thin layers of super imposed gauze created subtle transparencies and opacities, like varying densities of air, and became the manifestation of a somewhat ironic dialogue between the abstraction of the forms and the materiality of the resources. Even at that early date, though, there was no conflict between the experimental nature of the work and its self-assurance. Each work seemed to be born without hesitation –mature, the master of its own mediums, and that is another constant in the work of Luis Hernández Cruz.

During that same period, Hernández Cruz was gradually refining the formal elements that made up –Después de la lluvia en Toro Negro and were still present in Penumbra (1965, Illus.2). In Isla en rojo, 1965, and Ocaso Anaranjado, 1966 (Illus. 3), the forms were simplified; now they were broad fields of color, tending toward the monochrome and animated by variations in texture, organized in horizontal bands, like a memory of a landscape. In the latter work, it is surprising how the lower and upper bands have the same proportion (1:3) that classical painting gave to the land or sea and the sky, respectively– the same proportion Francisco Oller applied in his famous Central Plazuela.

In the years that followed, that monochromatic character of Hernández Cruz’s work would be not only accentuated, but reduced to two tonalities: whites and blues, reflective of the Island’s light and its sea, which acted as a kind spell on the artist.

Although most of Hernández Cruz’s informalist works were intimately linked to nature, the artist also sought other paths by which to examine the ambiguous relationship between self-reference and outside reality. Muro azul, 1964 is a harsh work, an impenetrable surface that explores the limits of dry, wrinkled textures, dense impastos, scratches and stratifications like wounds in stone. The more abstract use of pure plastic elements freed from any referentiality pointed, however, toward a hyper-reality: the pictorial surface was the mimetic equivalent of a wall that is painted and scratched, worn, marked by the hand of humans and of time. All the painting’s ambiguity was revealed, and with it, its temporal dimension. The idiom of the avant-garde expressed, layer by layer, the passage of centuries, This is one of the works closest to the spirit and aesthetic of Tápies, but the chromatic range belonged to Hernández Cruz and hos tropical sensibility.

That same year, 1964, a work such as La montaña blanca once again approximated –toutes proportions gardées– a “traditional” concept of representation that is antithetical to the pure materiality of Muro azul. The very title of the work made clear that intention to re-incorporate the real, or a heavily codified real, synthesized in forms that turned out to be, once again, an abstraction. And the reality itself was somewhat questionable, too: the white mass might evoke either a mountain range or a succession of silhouetted objects, a Morandi revised and carried to abstraction by Hernández Cruz. But the most striking thing about La montaña blanca –and, retrospectively, what is most significant vis-à-vis the corpus of his work– was its construction of a structure, its organization of schematized masses and planes, its achievement of balance –all values opposed to the Informalism of Muro azul, which is pure chromatic space.

That tendency to mute an intuitive lyricism b an insistence on order was to become another thread that runs through the work of Luis Hernández Cruz and that reappears, sometimes obliquely and quietly, sometimes clearly, in later periods.

During this same time, Hernández Cruz began doing sculpture, exhibiting a few small-format pieces of overwhelming expressive force. They were made of scrap wood and rusty pieces of iron –humble materials, with resonances of Arte Povera and Neo-Dada assembled roughly, like barbaric objects, and in them one could read the artist intent as both ironic, and of course, provocative: in the face of a national sculpture that was still solemn and commemorative, Hernández Cruz celebrated, with youthful acerbity, the random and insignificant, making those small objects knifelike instruments of war against conventionalism and boredom.

Radical abstraction

In 1967, a break occurred in the career of Luis Hernández Cruz. In a way foreshadowed, perhaps, by La montaña blanca, the emphasis on geometry now became a rigorously orthogonal idiom, willfully cold and inexpressive, and –despite the persistence of the horizontal line (Dicotomía de una forma)– stripped of any allusion, however tenuous, to external reality. This, more than an artistic experiment, represented the adoption of a program: to locate oneself as far as possible from the local, figurative, anecdotic, and narrative tradition, and even from any subjective effusions, any sensuality, any informalist lyricism; to become a member of the worldwide avant-garde, a participant in the Latin American movement which since the late forties had been drastically opposed to the telluric, magical, or magic-realism vision of the Continent. With respect to Hernández Cruz in particular, it meant a militancy, shared with his compatriots Domingo López and Carlos Irizarry, whose purpose was to bring Puerto Rico into those great stylistic waves that were sweeping over Latin America, taking on in each country the local accents that modulated the hegemonic features.

During this brief period –barely two years– two moments occurred that testified to the artist’s exploration intentions. The first was extremist: elimination of the chromatic spectrum in favor of white, black, and gray, and employment of industrial material such as metal screening, which created the moiré effects typical of Op-art. In the second moment, Hernández Cruz returned to color –a flat, brilliant color– an allied it to a rigorous geometry, an investigation of the use of non-artistic materials (such as fiberglass in Composición con pirámides II) and the seriation of constructivism modules repeated in mathematical rhythm. In both cases, the artist’s own particular stamp was veiled behind the impersonality of the media. Three silk screen prints (Estructura de un óvalo, Fuerzas magnéticas, and Puntos Amarillos, all 1967 (Illus. 4-5), are examples of that exercise in rigor and discipline.

However, that stage of asceticism was not just a parenthetical moment in a body of work marked by a lyrical impulse. It was a current that in fact reappeared later, particularly in the nineties, and as we mentioned earlier, there has always been an underlying, insistent geometry that filters emotion through the intellect.

Return to lyricism

The sixties were coming to an end –a decade in which Luis Hernández Cruz had assumed a leading role in the expansion of stylistic options for Puerto Rican art, a decade in which he himself explores avant-garde abstractions and mastered their idioms. In 1969, his Suite 14 paisajes marked his return to the abstract landscape-painting that he had left off some time earlier (Médano, 1968, Illus. 6) an his affirmation of that painting through these linoleum prints, all in horizontal format, all cut by a ribbon or band that evoked the line of the horizon and acted as a kind of leitmotiv for the series even within the more abstract atmospheres, the less naturalistic colors. Around that constant horizon were free forms –some more organic, others more geometric– laid out on flat, intelligently balanced chromatic surfaces and held within the strict limits required by linoleum– artistic resources that all contributed to the ease that one felt, and still feels, in those exquisite works in which nature became near and intimate. In the paintings of 1970 to 1972, these forms were diluted, and there was left only that horizon-line, like a bridge between the barely perceptible variation of the dominant blues or whites. But theses were blues and whites that were infinities of blue and white –sea, sky, and pure light, that light so reminiscent of Reverón, in which all “that is solid melts” and what remained was the brilliance and quietness of the Caribbean.

Paisaje marino and El jardín rojo both 1979 achieved maximum intensity in the synthesis of pure sensation and emotion, of pictorial idiom and the vestiges of nature, of an evocation of the ethereal and the materiality of the paint. Blue and red: blue like the immensity of the intangible, like the chromatic space that embraces everything; red like a point of anchorage. White that annihilates forms, and forms that struggled to reemerge, impregnating the white with grays and pinks and producing ghostly outlines, presences and absences (Rondó gris, 1972).

In 1971, the silk screen Composición en marrón was a harbinger, once again, of a new direction. Within the monochromatic palette, there was a radical shift in tonality, which was now somber. This change became clear in 1972 with Tríptico de la tierra, in which “earth” means not only the ochres, browns, and reds of a geological nature, but also the resurgence of matter in all its corporeality and the appearance, in shadows, of masses that evoke magma, the origins, mineral nature, the forces of the geological planet. This was a watershed piece: it symbolized the necessary return to matter, to the concrete, after a process of decantation that led to a boundary-situation that was hard to sustain: total transparency, which, carried to its ultimate consequences, would have been a tragic negation of painting itself, an annihilation of the artist’s vocation. Having deeply connected with the concrete, the artist could now, once again, rise toward the ineffable, and his Composición con formas blancas, 1973 functioned as a counterbalance to Tríptico de la tierra: here we saw an opposition of bright and dark, the heavenly and the earthly, the ethereal and the material, and yet those dichotomies were at the same time resolved by forms that echoed myth. It was a dialogue with cosmogony.

Mythic echoes

Beginning in 1976, the forms foreshadowed in Tríptico de la tierra became a new stage in Hernández Cruz’s production. In which coherence and diversity allied to create an artistic discourse, a spiritual testimony, and a force of identity of rare strength.

Now the earth was more than matter; it was culture, an Earth-Mother from which there arose figures rooted deep in ancestral times and memory, charged with sacred resonances. These were figures that had no precise referents but that evoked totems, altars, idols. Hernández Cruz cultivated hybridity in order to establish the greater distance between his work and archaeological illustration, another form of Indigenism and one which obviously was not what he himself was about. His references were formal and spiritual, imbued with an aesthetic that reminded one of pre-Hispanic and African roots without being anthropological per se. Archaeologies of memory more than of objects, these canvases brought together the organic, the vegetable, the magical in a generative, full way, reminiscent often of a Baroque exuberance (so typically Caribbean) without eve losing their ceremonial gravity. Nature was never far away; it persisted underground, as it were, but it was undeniable there –there is the horizon, a place now mythic and obsessive. The artist’s finest achievement in theses works with titles such as Centro de conjuros, Centro de sortilegios, Dioses de piedra, and Piedra de sacrificio (Illus. 7-8) was to embody archetypal references in contemporary forms, to transform himself into the heir and interpreter of a tradition that was still alive.

Likewise, a structure formed of colored masses (harking back to Suite 14 paisajes) acquired grater solidity and took on a more leading role during this stage, while color itself diversified and intensified in muted or glowing chords. Horizontally was a basic compositional element ordering these abstract figures that were simultaneously free and controlled, and that filled the pictorial space with their imposing presences, giving each work an overpowering monumentality.

During this time, which might be called his “archaeological period”, Hernández Cruz confirmed his close kinship to Latin American art rooted in the archaic tradition, such as in works by Fernando de Szyszlo, Gonzalo Fonseca, marcelo Bonevardi, Manuel Hernández, César Paternosto, all in turn indebted to Rufino Tamayo and Torres-García. These were artists who, like Hernández Cruz in Puerto Rico, did not give in to folklorism or academic conventions but instead attempted to fuse their own heritage with the principles of international avant-garde movements by seeking in their artistic forms of today, echoes of the spiritual past.

As he began this group of works in 1976, Hernández Cruz embarked upon a search related to his interests in the archaeological, and he arrived at a more abstract and refined idiom, which was revealed in Composición con forma ocre: forms marked by essentialism, interwoven in a broader matrix. With this piece, that artist showed himself to be one of the exponents of “sensitive geometry” in its most deeply Latin American strain, which expressed in its dialectic of intuition and reason, chaos and order, sensuality and asceticism the impassioned search for balance between the overwhelming forces of nature and myths, in the one side, and the realms of thought on the other. Hernández Cruz was to return to that fusion many times, and he has done so even in his most recent pieces; it is a principle that governs and channels his artistic expression.

This painting marked the beginning of a series of wood reliefs Relieve inicial con forma de torso, Torso descubierto, Hombre pájaro in which the artist created a single form that contained others, assembled like a puzzle. Relieve inicial is an associative game of figures, in a none-too-rigorous geometry, that make up a compact wall. In 1979, however, with Torso descubierto, the masses carried on a dialogue with the space, while at the same time they became, in the upper part, more organic. Finally, these reliefs took in a symbolic anthropomorphic aspect (of pre-Hispanic character) that coexisted at times with a controlled impulse toward the Baroque.

The sculpture of masses, also in wood, in the tradition of colonial wood-carving, that was produced in parallel with these relief-sculptures was inspired by organics forms, as were the others, but they also proposed solutions to problems such as tension and balance Formas tirantes I, Formas tirantes II.

During these same years, Hernández Cruz seemed to have had no fear of a certain eclecticism; in any case, he did not enclose himself within a single style, and he was never dogmatic. On the contrary, he was open to other aesthetic experiences and solutions. His painting Paisaje otoñal, 1978, in orange tones muted by browns, was born out of the persistence of abstract landscape attentive to the works (Rondó gris), but now the composition in contiguous and superimposed planes have replaced the earlier informalist lack of spatial definition.

Far from playing out a formula, his affinity for landscape seemed to feed on other sources, revealed in hos own work –forms generating yet other forms: the cultural embodied in the natural, the organic translated into the architectural, hybridity as a synthesis that respects differences. Paradigmatic of this tendency is Desde arriba, desde abajo, 1981, with its tempered lyricism, in which mysteriously bands and masses cross an informal field of color, their horizontality underscoring their kinship with nature.

In 1979, Luis Hernández Cruz painted Mar de Marlin, an atypical, disturbing work, for it seemed to question the abstraction/figuration dialect that had dominated all his work thus far. At first sight, the painting’s blue mass made one think that this was a return to the monochromatic spirit of the first years of the decade. In this case, there was a portrayal of waves, or better yet, a representation, for this was not equivalence or mimesis, as in Muro azul, and yet the indeterminacy of the point of view and scale contradicted the apparently realistic discourse. Reality itself was ungraspable and, like water, ran through the artist’s fingers.

In the early eighties, Hernández Cruz closed the archaeological cycle with new energy, introducing the human figure through ambiguous forms that reminded one of stone idols more than of living beings. Thus, there was a very marked conceptual distance between figuration and nature in these works, which referred to art rather than to nature: they were abstractions of abstraction. Danza ritual and Figuras totémicas II, 1980 and 1985, respectively (Illus. 9) are major examples from this period; the arrangement of the figures in a frieze accentuated the ritual and magical nature of the works. The first had a strongly geometrical character, while the second were in a more Baroque vein.

Nature and archaeological spirit entered into a dialogue in Memorias, 1984, as the title suggests, concrete reality grew distant, almost unattainable, barely made out through the filters that the artist imposed on it. Once again, this work seemed to arise out of the memory of earlier works (Rondó gris, Composición con formas blancas, Formas y blanco), now with more structure and matter, with the weight of a legacy that transcended the artist himself.

Other experiments

In 1984, a series of collage-drawings titled Historia de una pasión brought a provocative breath of new air to Hernández Cruz’s work, as had the small sculptures of the sixties. It swept away that grave measured character, that refinement in the earlier works, and it both introduced Expressionism and mocked it. Violent, brusque, clamorous brush strokes confronted rough, coarse surfaces; the artist was, with humor, standing off at a distance from his own work.

In 1986, two silk screens (Alegoría de las ideas I and II, Illus. 10) show a renewed interest in the human figure, as though they were a revisiting and development of the Figuras totémicas. One should not put too much trust in words, however; they do not always square with the language of the paintings themselves. In this case, “human figure” was, rather, a silhouette, a shadow, a ghost, a fleeting, burning vision. …In these works, there was a kind of a sequence in which the initial shape of form, itself elusive, began to disintegrate –to become abstract–, and culminated element was minimal, yet it grew in painting such as Aquelarre al amanecer, 1985, Este y el otro mundo, 1987, and Desencuentros, 1987 (Illus. 11). It grew, but it never achieved full portrayal. Instead, it remained in a blurry area in which the characters were improbable: simple outlines or masses that perhaps yearned for their lost condition as human beings, or perhaps sought after it because they never had it. They were monsters that the artist himself called “anti-figures”. In any case, it was an uncertain and wavering figuration at best.

That abrupt change of iconographic type, in which there was still a problematic relationship with the real, was accompanied by a more definitive shift in idiom: a violent chromatism, and a constant, important, though tremulous rendering in obsessive swaths (Danza tropical, 1988, photo-silk screen, Illus.12), in feverish brush strokes, in quick superimposed stripes.

As in Historia de una pasión, Hernández Cruz approached Expressionism through that period came in response to a need for experimentation and renewal, it is almost alien to the rest of his production. Thus, the return to landscape, to which he applied this fevered technique, was to be the basis for reconciliation. Paisaje amarillo, Montes oscuros, Paisaje exuberante, El bosque all 1989, (Illus. 13-14) represented a successful gambit, for they connected once again with the essential spirit of Hernández Cruz’s work: that fluid, inward-turning relationship with his surroundings. In them, there was a metonymic approach, as though a fragment –the landscape– could symbolize the whole –nature. It was, perhaps, what Mar de Marlin had suggested ten years earlier.

The return to order became clear with the serenity of landscapes such as El árbol de las manzanas de oro, 1990 (Illus. 15) and Luz en el bosque, 1992. He brush strokes were synthesized to an extreme in thin vertical lines from which there emerged colors forms, without drawn outlines. The ambivalence between figuration and abstraction was expressed in a decorative style (in the best sense of the word “decorative”) that transformed the data of the real into sinuous vegetable and anthropomorphic ornaments. These were paintings that might have served as models for tapestries, with those lines as the warp, that two-dimensional character that dignifies the plane of the wall, the warmth and tactile nature of the chromatics, and that quality of design akin to the (misnamed) minor arts.

New geometries

The year 1993 marked a renewed inclination toward geometric organization, entailing a reduction in the artist resources employed: there was no longer any place for the richness of textures, the impulse of the line, the mark of the brush stroke. This was a willful sacrifice, through which the artist began to concentrate on carrying color and composition to their maximum potential; once again, working against limits. But he refused to halt the pendulum-swing between the demands of rigorous abstraction and the vestiges of a nature that was always close, albeit in memory.

In Nubes blancas y horizonte negro, Nube violácea, and Nubes inmensas all 1994 (Illus. 16), a large monochromatic space (animated, however, by subtle variations, modulations, and transparencies) transported the spectator to a tremendous lyricism, in the spirit of those panoramic landscapes if the nineteenth century that attempted to include an entire Romantic vista of the infinitude of the American nature. The low line of the horizon allowed the most abstract and ungraspable part of that nature –its sky, its clouds, its atmospheres of noon, dusk, or stormy light– to display itself in all its fullness. In those large canvases –and the format supported this intention– the landscape per se recovered its condition so close to abstraction. And the regular succession of perfectly straight, arbitrary parallel horizontal lines in Nubes blancas y horizonte negro and Nube violácea, or vertical lines in Nubes inmensas, reinforced the abstraction by introducing a regular, geometric rhythm foreign to the elements that still suggested a figurative presence. Or, on the contrary, as in Muro azul, created a higher reality, when they came to resemble a grillwork interposed between the eye and the landscape, forcing the second place to be perceived through the “window open n the world” of renaissance painting. The ambiguity went unresolved, nor should it have been: it impregnated every possible level of reading, every interpretation left open by the artist. On the one hand, the endless, the immeasurable, an unconquerable nature; on the other, the imposition of the intellect –and thus, sensitive geometry’s dialectic allowed irrational forces to reappear behind (or below) the workings of order. These canvases seemed to be a symbol of that struggle.

In that same year, 1994, the series Cosmos offers variation in the same theme: the abstract and the “figurative” (which has to be put inside quotation marks) were parceled out in differing proportions over the plane f the canvas, where they mingled and carried on their dialogue. Cosmos y mar (Illus. 17) and Cosmos y bosque (Illus. 18) were governed by the same compositional principle: a low horizontal band corresponding to a stylized and connotative, almost abstract, interpretation of nature. The rest of the plane was a monochromatic mass without referents, interrupted in the upper section by circles arranged seemingly at random and thereby breaking the rigorous seriality of the vertical lines that cover the entire pictorial surface, including the “landscape”. Different states of abstraction creating diverse combinatory options. At the same time, this stage of Hernández Cruz’s work exhibited the greatest synthesis of elements: its informalist monochromatic character; landscape; wavering or orthodox geometry –elements that were integrated and that supported one another; not just an inventory of possibilities. Now there was a renewed privileging of the pictorial surface as the stage on which tensions might be calmed. The brief expressionist outbursts fell behind, giving was to a dynamism tempered by quietness –a quietness animated by a lyrical vibration.

In 1995, the disappearance of the natural element become another step in the consolidation of the abstract idiom. As had happened in 1967-68, works such as the series –Informe de la galaxia II broke away from abstraction as a gradual process of decantation of nature in order to emphasize what was essential in it (where Mondrian’s “tree” is the prototype) and took abstraction as the point of departure. As though they were mosaics, small colorful boxes were the next step –sometimes, as in Pictoris, in the almost monochromatic palette so clear to the artist. These boxes seemed to follow some esoteric (and still unsolved) mathematical or musical order, and the aesthetic result was a sparkling unstable surface that led us into a space that was “other”, unreachable by visual perception and therefore more poetic than scientific, or that allowed us to glimpse the poetry contained in science.

In the nineties, Hernández Cruz’s bent for experimentation was manifested in the creation of a series in which variations were carried out on a formal premise. This was the case with Ritmo-pared II, 1998, in which fields of a single color alternated with bands made up of thin colored vertical lines. The painting seemed to be governed by the principles of strict geometric abstraction and virtual optical effects (as in the Coloritmos and Tablones by Venezuelan Alejandro Otero) that dynamized the surface, with active areas alternating with inert areas. However, these works bore their own contradictions, in the form of slight modifications that left open chinks for the return of the aleatory, the accidental, the humanly imperfect. The planes of color were not entirely uniform: they allowed modulations of light and shadow; the surface was not altogether smooth, but instead had drips and transparencies; the vertical borders sometimes slightly cracked or broken and blurred. The hand of the artisan, which allowed the paint to express itself organically, disturbed the precision of the pre-established formula: once again, geometry became sensitive. And the landscape bands became the line of the horizon for that indeterminate space: nature as an obsession would not turn the artist loose, even when he wanted to ignore it.

In 1999’s Reflexiones cromáticas –small-format pieces that revealed their studio-experimental nature– the disturbance of geometric order by color became clear. Squares revealed and concealed by colored masses, visible brush strokes that silenced the coldness of the sequence, orthogonal forms that turned into smears: what remained of geometrical order was barely a memory. The artist clearly delighted in breaking his own rules.

Freedom recovered

Freedom recovered has taken over Hernández Cruz’s most recent works –a self-assured freedom without boasting or braggadocio that is simply there, and that shares space with balance and measure.

It is this atmosphere that harmoniously fills works such as Silencio and Paisaje doble both 2001 and the variations of the Suite ibérica, 2002. In the first two paintings, there is a rebirth of the essential and intangible aspects of the Island’s nature: sky and sea the light of the tropics. In open bands of various blues, this nature is once again on full display: this is neither abstraction nor abstract landscape-painting nor abstracted figuration, but simply nature itself, beloved, ineluctable, calling to the artist to portray it in all its splendor. A few discreet straight lines, ribbons of color, still reflect, though quietly, the fading presence of geometry.

In the Suite ibérica, the most normative aspects of the Ritmo-pared series are diluted and the most informal aspects are privileged in chromatic exaltation and delicacy of subject. How many elements of Hernández Cruz’s painting are present, obliquely, in that refined idiom, filled with the solemnity of great achievements, in these works apparently so simple, so obvious?

Luis Hernández Cruz accumulates and eliminates, selects and treasures. Accents that are all his own allow us to identify him despite all shifts of style and interest, because his work is above all faithful to itself, consistent in its achievements, and in its own intentions and ambitions it finds a basis for always-renewing experiences.