Arnaldo Larrinaga, Love Strokes
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.
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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