The Eye of the Sky is Open: The Art of Carlos Betancourt.
The Yoruba of Nigeria have an idiom for good weather: the eye of the sky is open. This is the world of Carlos Betancourt, a world ruled by color, starting with blue, like Klein, like Matisse. Betancourt thinks cosmologically, too: the dome of the sky, the surge of the sea, and the straight-lined horizon are on his mind. This puts him in parallel with ancestral cultures, like the makers of the Nazca lines, or, more to the point. Ana Mendieta's fusion of body and landscape. This is an artist inspired by faraway epochs; sites and traditions where women and men paint on the canvas of body, looking like worlds aflame with red pigment, alive with dotted signs of kinesis and majesty.
This is the way we meet him, body cropped artfully, hands offering an object, biceps and pectorals curving with strength, skin dressed in jolts of blue and gold pigment, as if scratched by the forces of nature. [Plate l] This is his idea of a footnote, to pose at a spot near where his clearest and most constant influence, Ana Mendieta, once herself worked. He is holding in both hands a nest that had fallen from a tree in Little Havana, not far from where Ana Mendieta had famously fashioned one of her silhouettes. With this nest he is offering an architecture of life, meant for small creatures who, like the soul of Mendieta, eventually took flight.
Betancourt's late colleague, Keith Haring, once said "primordial styles make you
new", and proved it with spaceships circling the pyramids. Betancourt, similarly, brings into consonance visions ancient and contemporary. Like the powerful silhouettes of
Kara Walker, Carlos's work cries out for the wall, not the page. Caught in a catalogue, the sly promiscuities of Walker unduly are spotlit by linear arrangements. This slows the art down. But march them around the white walls of a gallery and aesthetics take over, putting the obscene in its place.
Similarly, Carlos loves to pose without clothes. White butt on white page accents a
narcissist. But consider the mural, Worshipping of My Ancestors: five photographs of him bare-chested on a wall, body blazing lurid orange, pointing and signing in five different ways. [Plate 2] By involving his body in a procession of gestures things get serious: he's following the path of ritual, taking us back to women and men who believed they had a responsibility for bringing back Spring with motion and gesture, for lighting up winter with candles on evergreens.
The ancient Peruvians were unafraid to use whole valleys as canvas, making the famous lines of the Nazca. Betancourt lets a lagoon paint a backdrop for an ochre- marked, languorous, portrait of his body. . [Plate 3] He reclines in a corner, gazing out at the water. One hand shows his heart, the other grasps a conch shell. Photography
rules: cropping is all. The resulting one-corner composition recalls, to this art historian, a favored device of the painters of the Southern Sung.
Betancourt likes to work in series. In this way he is not so much portraying the rituals
of Amerindian and Afro-Caribbean cultures, as casting them, like actors, in a vast photo-muralized show. An example: a thicket of trees frames the profile of a naked woman. Her breast is engorged, her nipple erect, and her belly protrudes with 'the obstetric line', the curve of a woman come to full term. Framing thusly, as if in an improvised altar hidden the woods, he dramatizes her midriff as a vessel for children, and her nipple as a spout for their nourishment. He is playing with raw nature but the intention is love. He is saying with photographed body art what Neruda said with words: I want to do
with you what Spring does with cherry trees.
In other words, he wants us to blossom, red warm and hot.. Consider a photograph of an elegant woman with blue eyes whom he's covered with pink paint [Plate 5] She is the canvas but the canvas stares back. In control of all this, Betancourt is not so much painting his subject, then photographing her, as filming her portrait for dramatic projection on a huge slice of gallery space that reads like a screen.
Betancourt's oeuvre is peopled with echoes of natïve accomplishment, Taino, Lucumi, Afro-Puerto Rican, even the original Berber inhabitants of the Islas Canarias. He dreams of their festivals, brilliant and fast. From constant immersion in the arts of native peoples sometimes their power comes over his work, making us live once again in their time.
Take for instance, a well-armed earthwork, showing a row of cavities dug into earth ritualized with white pigment, Each hole is glowing, with bright fuchsia paint. Arms carefully crossed, as if to ward off a force or a problem, a reclining figure places his head within one of these cavities. This strong composition lies in spiritual kinship with the famous outline of a hand with a line of red dots found in the prehistoric cave of Pech-Merle at Cabrerets in France . The dots are amazing. They pulse on the wall like the hearts of young embryos, naked to our eyes without a body to hide them. By means equally dramatic Betancourt involves us in a private ritual, aimed at something primordial and important, like the secret of life or the order of the world.
In the last few years, his work has .miraculously exfoliated, , taking him through changes of style and location. For instance, out of the soil of Loiza Aldea, famed center for bomba dancing and other black traditions on the north coast of the island of Puerto Rico, Betancourt in 2002 fashioned myriad little sculptures and unified this series by
painting them blue. Some of them read like fugitive pieces of jewelry, cut from turquoise.. As he experiments with these forms he gets bolder and bolder until finally he lets them set sail in boat-like compositions moored on the floor of gallery space [Plates 7 and 8] They recall the floor compositions by Jose Bedia, in addition to works by Tony Cragg, the British sculptor and environment-maker. One [Plate 8] reads like a barge, laden with giant goblets, plates, and small vessels.
There is a great tradition of masks in Puerto Rico. Betancourt, who himself is Puerto
Rican, plugs into that. There is a style of mask made from cocoanut shells, bristling with
insertions of multiple horns. He played with this horned element until he got a sense of it: masking is hiding. Suddenly he was making his own kind of mask, binding strange forms to the front of the face, then photographing the result against fast-moving water and huge grayish stones. [plate 9]
All of the above serves as cultural preparation for Betancourt's exciting new effort, The Enchanted Island, a fleeting exhibition of thousands of miniature towers made from a combination of sand and glue. They are arranged in a solid grid across the floor of the
gallery rooms. The whole installation will eventually be erased by the artist. The ephemeral nature of these ritual forms match other fleeting forms, like his neo-Puerto Rican masks; gleaming pools of fuschia in white earth; and even what might be
termed a self-Pieta, where his body is draped not on Mary but earth by the water.
. Note that in the last-mentioned composition he holds at his midriff a pilgrim's
white shell, a hint that he's constantly moving, leaving behind impermanent traces on the road to new work.
Enchanted Island slows you down, like rumble-treads guarding a fast-lane toll exit. Their bristling texture, their obsessive repetiveness, , take and compel us. They are making things happen across time and space. We discover the artist, appropriately naked, before this rich earthwork. He sits like a shaman, surveying a song-line on the soil of Australia. [Plate 10] Art is his discipline: discovery of self through immersion in vision..
Robert Farris Thompson
February 14, 2006
New Haven.
02:22 PM 2/14/2006, you wrote:
>Dear Mr. Thompson
> thank you for getting the text to us.
>But, I'm wondering if you don't have a digital format text we can just
>send to the designer.
>
>Thank you very mcuh and sorry for the inconveniences
>
>JOdie Dinapoli
>
>
>
> >>Jodie Dinapoli
> >
> >
> >
The Eye of the Sky is Open: The Art of Carlos Betancourt.
The Yoruba of Nigeria have an idiom for good weather: the eye of the sky is open. This is the world of Carlos Betancourt, a world ruled by color, starting with blue, like Klein, like Matisse. Betancourt thinks cosmologically, too: the dome of the sky, the surge of the sea, and the straight-lined horizon are on his mind . This puts him in parallel with ancestral cultures, like the makers of the Nazca lines, or, more to the point. Ana Mendieta's fusion of body and landscape. This is an artist inspired by faraway epochs; sites and traditions where women and men paint on the canvas of body, looking like worlds aflame with red pigment, alive with dotted signs of kinesis and majesty.
This is the way we meet him, body cropped artfully, hands offering an object, biceps and pectorals curving with strength, skin dressed in jolts of blue and gold pigment, as if scratched by the forces of nature. [Plate l] This is his idea of a footnote, to pose at a spot near where his clearest and most constant influence, Ana Mendieta, once herself worked. He is holding in both hands a nest that had fallen from a tree in Little Havana, not far from where Ana Mendieta had famously fashioned one of her silhouettes. With this nest he is offering an architecture of life, meant for small creatures who, like the soul of Mendieta, eventually took flight.
Betancourt's late colleague, Keith Haring, once said "primordial styles make you new", and proved it with spaceships circling the pyramids. Betancourt, similarly, brings into consonance visions ancient and contemporary. Like the powerful silhouettes of Kara Walker, Carlos's work cries out for the wall, not the page. Caught in a catalogue, the sly promiscuities of Walker unduly are spotlit by linear arrangements. This slows the art down. But march them around the white walls of a gallery and aesthetics take over, putting the obscene in its place.
Similarly, Carlos loves to pose without clothes. White butt on white page accents a narcissist. But consider the mural, Worshipping of My Ancestors: five photographs of him bare-chested on a wall, body blazing lurid orange, pointing and signing in five different ways. [Plate 2] By involving his body in a procession of gestures things get serious: he's following the path of ritual, taking us back to women and men who believed they had a responsibility for bringing back Spring with motion and gesture, for lighting up winter with candles on evergreens.
The ancient Peruvians were unafraid to use whole valleys as canvas, making the famous lines of the Nazca. Betancourt lets a lagoon paint a backdrop for an ochre- marked, languorous, portrait of his body. . [Plate 3] He reclines in a corner, gazing out at the water. One hand shows his heart, the other grasps a conch shell. Photography rules: cropping is all. The resulting one-corner composition recalls, to this art historian, a favored device of the painters of the Southern Sung.
Betancourt likes to work in series. In this way he is not so much portraying the rituals of Amerindian and Afro-Caribbean cultures, as casting them, like actors, in a vast photo-muralized show. An example: a thicket of trees frames the profile of a naked woman. Her breast is engorged, her nipple erect, and her belly protrudes with 'the obstetric line', the curve of a woman come to full term. Framing thusly, as if in an improvised altar hidden the woods, he dramatizes her midriff as a vessel for children, and her nipple as a spout for their nourishment. He is playing with raw nature but the intention is love. He is saying with photographed body art what Neruda said with words: I want to do with you what Spring does with cherry trees.
In other words, he wants us to blossom, red warm and hot.. Consider a photograph of an elegant woman with blue eyes whom he's covered with pink paint [Plate 5]
She is the canvas but the canvas stares back. In control of all this, Betancourt is not so much painting his subject, then photographing her, as filming her portrait for dramatic projection on a huge slice of gallery space that reads like a screen.
Betancourt's oeuvre is peopled with echoes of natïve accomplishment, Taino, Lucumi, Afro-Puerto Rican, even the original Berber inhabitants of the Islas Canarias. He dreams of their festivals, brilliant and fast. From constant immersion in the arts of native peoples sometimes their power comes over his work, making us live once again in their time.
Take for instance, a well-armed earthwork, showing a row of cavities dug into earth ritualized with white pigment, Each hole is glowing, with bright fuchsia paint. Arms carefully crossed, as if to ward off a force or a problem, a reclining figure places his head within one of these cavities. This strong composition lies in spiritual kinship with the famous outline of a hand with a line of red dots found in the prehistoric cave of Pech-Merle at Cabrerets in France . The dots are amazing. They pulse on the wall like the hearts of young embryos, naked to our eyes without a body to hide them. By means equally dramatic Betancourt involves us in a private ritual, aimed at something primordial and important, like the secret of life or the order of the world.
In the last few years, his work has .miraculously exfoliated, , taking him through changes of style and location. For instance, out of the soil of Loiza Aldea, famed center for bomba dancing and other black traditions on the north coast of the island of Puerto Rico, Betancourt in 2002 fashioned myriad little sculptures and unified this series by painting them blue. Some of them read like fugitive pieces of jewelry, cut from turquoise.. As he experiments with these forms he gets bolder and bolder until finally he lets them set sail in boat-like compositions moored on the floor of gallery space [Plates 7 and 8] They recall the floor compositions by Jose Bedia, in addition to works by Tony Cragg, the British sculptor and environment-maker. One [Plate 8] reads like a barge, laden with giant goblets, plates, and small vessels.
There is a great tradition of masks in Puerto Rico. Betancourt, who himself is Puerto Rican, plugs into that. There is a style of mask made from cocoanut shells, bristling with insertions of multiple horns. He played with this horned element until he got a sense of it: masking is hiding. Suddenly he was making his own kind of mask, binding strange forms to the front of the face, then photographing the result against fast-moving water and huge grayish stones. [plate 9]
All of the above serves as cultural preparation for Betancourt's exciting new effort, The Enchanted Island, a fleeting exhibition of thousands of miniature towers made from a combination of sand and glue. They are arranged in a solid grid across the floor of the gallery rooms. The whole installation will eventually be erased by the artist. The ephemeral nature of these ritual forms match other fleeting forms, like his neo-Puerto Rican masks; gleaming pools of fuschia in white earth; and even what might be termed a self-Pieta, where his body is draped not on Mary but earth by the water. . Note that in the last-mentioned composition he holds at his midriff a pilgrim's white shell, a hint that he's constantly moving, leaving behind impermanent traces on the road to new work..
Enchanted Island slows you down, like rumble-treads guarding a fast-lane toll exit. . Their bristling texture, their obsessive repetiveness, , take and compel us. They are making things happen across time and space. We discover the artist, appropriately naked, before this rich earthwork. He sits like a shaman, surveying a song-line on the soil of Australia. [Plate 10] Art is his discipline: discovery of self through immersion in vision..
Robert Farris Thompson
February 14, 2006
New Haven.
02:22 PM 2/14/2006, you wrote:
Dear Mr. Thompson
thank you for getting the text to us.
But, I'm wondering if you don't have a digital format text we can just
send to the designer.
Thank you very mcuh and sorry for the inconveniences
JOdie Dinapoli
The Eye of the Sky
is Open: The Art of Carlos Betancourt.
The Yoruba of Nigeria have an idiom for
good weather: the eye of the sky is open. This
is the world of Carlos Betancourt, a world ruled
by color, starting with blue, like Klein,
like Matisse. Betancourt
thinks cosmologically, too: the dome of the
sky, the surge of the sea, and the
straight-lined horizon are on his mind
. This puts him in parallel with ancestral
cultures, like the makers of the Nazca
lines, or, more to the point. Ana Mendieta's
fusion of body and landscape. This is an
artist inspired by faraway epochs; sites and
traditions where women and men paint on the
canvas of body, looking like worlds aflame with
red pigment, alive with dotted signs of kinesis and majesty.
This is the way we meet him, body cropped
artfully, hands offering an object, biceps and
pectorals curving with strength, skin dressed
in jolts of blue and gold pigment, as
if scratched by the forces of nature. [Plate
l] This is his idea of a footnote, to pose at
a spot near where his clearest and most constant
influence, Ana Mendieta, once herself worked.
He is holding in both hands a nest that had
fallen from a tree in Little Havana, not far
from where Ana Mendieta had famously fashioned
one of her silhouettes. With this nest he is
offering an architecture of life, meant for
small creatures who, like the soul of Mendieta, eventually took flight.
Betancourt's late colleague, Keith
Haring, once said "primordial styles make you
new", and proved it with spaceships circling the
pyramids. Betancourt, similarly, brings into
consonance visions ancient and
contemporary. Like the powerful silhouettes of
Kara Walker, Carlos's work cries out for the
wall, not the page. Caught in a catalogue, the
sly promiscuities of Walker unduly are spotlit
by linear arrangements. This slows the art
down. But march them around the white walls of a
gallery and aesthetics take over, putting the obscene in its place.
Similarly, Carlos loves to pose without
clothes. White butt on white page accents a
narcissist. But consider the
mural, Worshipping of My Ancestors: five
photographs of him bare-chested on a wall, body
blazing lurid orange, pointing and signing in
five different ways. [Plate 2] By
involving his body in a procession of gestures
things get serious: he's following the path of
ritual, taking us back to women and men who
believed they had a responsibility for bringing
back Spring with motion and gesture, for
lighting up winter with candles on evergreens.
The ancient Peruvians were unafraid to use
whole valleys as canvas, making the famous lines
of the Nazca. Betancourt lets a lagoon paint a
backdrop for an ochre- marked,
languorous, portrait of his body. . [Plate
3] He reclines in a corner, gazing out at the
water. One hand shows his heart, the other
grasps a conch shell. Photography
rules: cropping is all. The
resulting one-corner composition recalls, to
this art historian, a favored device of the painters of the Southern Sung.
Betancourt likes to work in series. In
this way he is not so much portraying the rituals
of Amerindian and Afro-Caribbean cultures, as
casting them, like actors, in a
vast photo-muralized show. An example: a
thicket of trees frames the profile of a naked
woman. Her breast is engorged, her nipple
erect, and her belly protrudes with 'the
obstetric line', the curve of a woman come to
full term. Framing thusly, as if in an
improvised altar hidden the woods, he dramatizes
her midriff as a vessel for children, and her
nipple as a spout for their nourishment. He is
playing with raw nature but the intention is
love. He is saying with photographed body
art what Neruda said with words: I want to do
with you what Spring does with cherry trees.
In other words, he wants us to
blossom, red warm and hot.. Consider a
photograph of an elegant woman with blue eyes
whom he's covered with pink paint [Plate 5]
She is the canvas but the canvas stares
back. In control of all this, Betancourt is not
so much painting his subject, then photographing
her, as filming her portrait for
dramatic projection on a huge slice of gallery
space that reads like a screen.
Betancourt's oeuvre is peopled with
echoes of
natïve accomplishment, Taino, Lucumi,
Afro-Puerto Rican, even the original Berber
inhabitants of the Islas Canarias. He dreams of
their festivals, brilliant
and fast. From constant immersion in the arts
of native peoples sometimes their power comes
over his work, making us live once again in their time.
Take for instance, a
well-armed earthwork, showing a row of cavities
dug into earth ritualized with white
pigment, Each hole is glowing, with bright
fuchsia paint. Arms carefully crossed, as if to
ward off a force or a problem, a reclining
figure places his head within one of these
cavities. This strong composition lies in
spiritual kinship with the famous outline of a
hand with a line of red dots found in the
prehistoric cave of Pech-Merle at Cabrerets in
France . The dots are amazing. They pulse on
the wall like the hearts of
young embryos, naked to our eyes without a body
to hide them. By means equally
dramatic Betancourt involves us in a private
ritual, aimed at something primordial and
important, like the secret of life or the order of the world.
In the last few years, his work has
.miraculously exfoliated, , taking him
through changes of style and location. For
instance, out of the soil of Loiza Aldea, famed
center for bomba dancing and other black
traditions on the north coast of the island of
Puerto Rico, Betancourt in 2002 fashioned myriad
little sculptures and unified this series by
painting them blue. Some of them read like
fugitive pieces of jewelry, cut from
turquoise.. As he experiments with these forms
he gets bolder and bolder until finally he lets
them set sail in boat-like compositions moored on
the floor of gallery space [Plates 7 and 8] They
recall the floor compositions by Jose
Bedia, in addition to works by Tony Cragg, the
British sculptor and environment-maker. One
[Plate 8] reads like a barge, laden with giant
goblets, plates, and small vessels.
There is a great tradition of masks in
Puerto Rico. Betancourt, who himself is Puerto
Rican, plugs into that. There is a style of
mask made from cocoanut shells, bristling with
insertions of multiple horns. He played with
this horned element until he got a sense of it:
masking is hiding. Suddenly he was making his
own kind of mask, binding strange forms to the
front of the face, then photographing the
result against fast-moving water and huge grayish stones. [plate 9]
All of the above serves as cultural
preparation for Betancourt's exciting
new effort, The Enchanted Island, a fleeting
exhibition of thousands of miniature towers made
from a combination of sand and glue. They are
arranged in a solid grid across the floor of the
gallery rooms. The whole installation will
eventually be erased by the
artist. The ephemeral nature of these ritual
forms match other fleeting forms, like his
neo-Puerto Rican masks; gleaming pools of
fuschia in white earth; and even what might be
termed a self-Pieta, where his body is
draped not on Mary but earth by the water.
. Note that in the last-mentioned composition he
holds at his midriff a pilgrim's
white shell, a hint that he's constantly
moving, leaving behind impermanent traces on the road to new work..
Enchanted Island slows you down, like
rumble-treads guarding a fast-lane toll exit.
. Their bristling texture, their obsessive
repetiveness, , take and compel us. They are
making things happen across time and space. We
discover the artist, appropriately naked,
before this rich earthwork. He sits like a
shaman, surveying a song-line on the soil of
Australia. [Plate 10] Art is
his discipline: discovery of self through immersion in vision..
Robert Farris Thompson
February 14, 2006
New Haven.
02:22 PM 2/14/2006, you wrote:
>Dear Mr. Thompson
> thank you for getting the text to us.
>But, I'm wondering if you don't have a digital format text we can just
>send to the designer.
>
>Thank you very mcuh and sorry for the inconveniences
>
>JOdie Dinapoli
>
>
>
> >>Jodie Dinapoli
> >
> >
> >
The Eye of the Sky is Open: The Art of Carlos Betancourt.
The Yoruba of Nigeria have an idiom for good weather: the eye of the sky is open. This is the world of Carlos Betancourt, a world ruled by color, starting with blue, like Klein, like Matisse. Betancourt thinks cosmologically, too: the dome of the sky, the surge of the sea, and the straight-lined horizon are on his mind . This puts him in parallel with ancestral cultures, like the makers of the Nazca lines, or, more to the point. Ana Mendieta's fusion of body and landscape. This is an artist inspired by faraway epochs; sites and traditions where women and men paint on the canvas of body, looking like worlds aflame with red pigment, alive with dotted signs of kinesis and majesty.
This is the way we meet him, body cropped artfully, hands offering an object, biceps and pectorals curving with strength, skin dressed in jolts of blue and gold pigment, as if scratched by the forces of nature. [Plate l] This is his idea of a footnote, to pose at a spot near where his clearest and most constant influence, Ana Mendieta, once herself worked. He is holding in both hands a nest that had fallen from a tree in Little Havana, not far from where Ana Mendieta had famously fashioned one of her silhouettes. With this nest he is offering an architecture of life, meant for small creatures who, like the soul of Mendieta, eventually took flight.
Betancourt's late colleague, Keith Haring, once said "primordial styles make you new", and proved it with spaceships circling the pyramids. Betancourt, similarly, brings into consonance visions ancient and contemporary. Like the powerful silhouettes of Kara Walker, Carlos's work cries out for the wall, not the page. Caught in a catalogue, the sly promiscuities of Walker unduly are spotlit by linear arrangements. This slows the art down. But march them around the white walls of a gallery and aesthetics take over, putting the obscene in its place.
Similarly, Carlos loves to pose without clothes. White butt on white page accents a narcissist. But consider the mural, Worshipping of My Ancestors: five photographs of him bare-chested on a wall, body blazing lurid orange, pointing and signing in five different ways. [Plate 2] By involving his body in a procession of gestures things get serious: he's following the path of ritual, taking us back to women and men who believed they had a responsibility for bringing back Spring with motion and gesture, for lighting up winter with candles on evergreens.
The ancient Peruvians were unafraid to use whole valleys as canvas, making the famous lines of the Nazca. Betancourt lets a lagoon paint a backdrop for an ochre- marked, languorous, portrait of his body. . [Plate 3] He reclines in a corner, gazing out at the water. One hand shows his heart, the other grasps a conch shell. Photography rules: cropping is all. The resulting one-corner composition recalls, to this art historian, a favored device of the painters of the Southern Sung.
Betancourt likes to work in series. In this way he is not so much portraying the rituals of Amerindian and Afro-Caribbean cultures, as casting them, like actors, in a vast photo-muralized show. An example: a thicket of trees frames the profile of a naked woman. Her breast is engorged, her nipple erect, and her belly protrudes with 'the obstetric line', the curve of a woman come to full term. Framing thusly, as if in an improvised altar hidden the woods, he dramatizes her midriff as a vessel for children, and her nipple as a spout for their nourishment. He is playing with raw nature but the intention is love. He is saying with photographed body art what Neruda said with words: I want to do with you what Spring does with cherry trees.
In other words, he wants us to blossom, red warm and hot.. Consider a photograph of an elegant woman with blue eyes whom he's covered with pink paint [Plate 5]
She is the canvas but the canvas stares back. In control of all this, Betancourt is not so much painting his subject, then photographing her, as filming her portrait for dramatic projection on a huge slice of gallery space that reads like a screen.
Betancourt's oeuvre is peopled with echoes of natïve accomplishment, Taino, Lucumi, Afro-Puerto Rican, even the original Berber inhabitants of the Islas Canarias. He dreams of their festivals, brilliant and fast. From constant immersion in the arts of native peoples sometimes their power comes over his work, making us live once again in their time.
Take for instance, a well-armed earthwork, showing a row of cavities dug into earth ritualized with white pigment, Each hole is glowing, with bright fuchsia paint. Arms carefully crossed, as if to ward off a force or a problem, a reclining figure places his head within one of these cavities. This strong composition lies in spiritual kinship with the famous outline of a hand with a line of red dots found in the prehistoric cave of Pech-Merle at Cabrerets in France . The dots are amazing. They pulse on the wall like the hearts of young embryos, naked to our eyes without a body to hide them. By means equally dramatic Betancourt involves us in a private ritual, aimed at something primordial and important, like the secret of life or the order of the world.
In the last few years, his work has .miraculously exfoliated, , taking him through changes of style and location. For instance, out of the soil of Loiza Aldea, famed center for bomba dancing and other black traditions on the north coast of the island of Puerto Rico, Betancourt in 2002 fashioned myriad little sculptures and unified this series by painting them blue. Some of them read like fugitive pieces of jewelry, cut from turquoise.. As he experiments with these forms he gets bolder and bolder until finally he lets them set sail in boat-like compositions moored on the floor of gallery space [Plates 7 and 8] They recall the floor compositions by Jose Bedia, in addition to works by Tony Cragg, the British sculptor and environment-maker. One [Plate 8] reads like a barge, laden with giant goblets, plates, and small vessels.
There is a great tradition of masks in Puerto Rico. Betancourt, who himself is Puerto Rican, plugs into that. There is a style of mask made from cocoanut shells, bristling with insertions of multiple horns. He played with this horned element until he got a sense of it: masking is hiding. Suddenly he was making his own kind of mask, binding strange forms to the front of the face, then photographing the result against fast-moving water and huge grayish stones. [plate 9]
All of the above serves as cultural preparation for Betancourt's exciting new effort, The Enchanted Island, a fleeting exhibition of thousands of miniature towers made from a combination of sand and glue. They are arranged in a solid grid across the floor of the gallery rooms. The whole installation will eventually be erased by the artist. The ephemeral nature of these ritual forms match other fleeting forms, like his neo-Puerto Rican masks; gleaming pools of fuschia in white earth; and even what might be termed a self-Pieta, where his body is draped not on Mary but earth by the water. . Note that in the last-mentioned composition he holds at his midriff a pilgrim's white shell, a hint that he's constantly moving, leaving behind impermanent traces on the road to new work..
Enchanted Island slows you down, like rumble-treads guarding a fast-lane toll exit. . Their bristling texture, their obsessive repetiveness, , take and compel us. They are making things happen across time and space. We discover the artist, appropriately naked, before this rich earthwork. He sits like a shaman, surveying a song-line on the soil of Australia. [Plate 10] Art is his discipline: discovery of self through immersion in vision..
Robert Farris Thompson
February 14, 2006
New Haven.
02:22 PM 2/14/2006, you wrote:
Dear Mr. Thompson
thank you for getting the text to us.
But, I'm wondering if you don't have a digital format text we can just
send to the designer.
Thank you very mcuh and sorry for the inconveniences
JOdie Dinapoli
>>Jodie Dinapoli
>
>
>