Michel Blazquez Paintings By Conrado De La Torre

Your secrets rest the memory appears accomplice of the time M.B.M

I perceived Michel Blázquez paintings as a goddess' bestiary. Cosmogony where legendary anecdotes of ancestral myths and fables of his own existential experiences coincide in another time and another space, ego-poetic of an overwhelmed monologue of ideas and feelings, where pagan religious symbols interlace with emblematic figures of a hurt nationality, a lineage squandered by time. The religious subject-matter of medieval inspiration, loaded with humanism, with personages and updated events, transmits to the recipient an emotive and evocative perception of historical images, especially if they have been, as the artist, rooted out of his original context. Blázquez’s plastic codes - symbolic and semantics - intent to be assimilated to the new existential conglomerate that represents the waved life in a cosmopolitan and crushing city, a metropolis of daydreams, concrete, glass, steel, which the "transplanted one" (or émigré) might have to assumed like his own if he pretends to be inserted in a new figurative language, and to be incorporated to the particular canoness of the recipient nation. In “Metáforas de Santos”, acrylic on canvas, 1997, each of the represented personages shows the condition of isocefalia. Throughout the painting there are distinctive features of the medieval painting, where heads and faces are placed in the pictorial space in dissimilar planes of depth, to denote or to repair in his emotions and individual feelings on a more effective way. He turns them indistinctly into real psychological portraits of the context or general plot where the action of big dramatic intensity is developed. The Holy Cross, central element and unifier of the action, is simultaneously an amalgam of religious sacred and pagan references, symbol of the Christianity , symbol of the beam that was stained with the blood of the redeemer, summary of his faith, moral and peregrination on earth; in the crossroads of the cross, as in the crossroads of the ways erected is the symbol of the Orisha Eleggua, the messenger between the two worlds, the human being and the divine one, who opens the doors and the ways in life, who controls destiny and determines happiness or calamity. As tattoos, the cross shows esoteric dissimilar ensigns that mend us to a metal state of evocative connections and cultural primary references. The palm, the chalice, the rooster, the golden blow of the Statue of Liberty, each one indistinct and simultaneously established a parable, or as the title indicated a metaphor of multiple allegories. In Blázquez’s painting, as in medieval painting, the use of symbolisms and a complex iconological language is very important to denote concepts established in the artist’s existential conscience, as well as the community or cultural environment from which he comes. In " “La revestidura del tiempo”, acrylic and xylography on canvas, 2009, the artist establishes a parable of images between the venerated virgin of the yellow cloak, the Caridad del Cobre, the patron of the distant nation, essence of Cuban religiosity, the mix of religious credence, the pure image of syncretism and homeland born out of an amalgam of cultures, who with a hieratic face carries with steadfastness on his arm the figure of Marti, the

apostle, the thinker, the politician, the poet, and in unison this one carrying on his hands, as renovator trace, cutting and indelible saber, the Real Palm, the same one that rises straight and virile between mountains and light cloudscapes in the national shield. The interpretation of Marti’s figure has been a constant in the work of Blázquez, as genuine inheritor of the generation of artists who saw him born in his longed homeland. In “Versos del alma”, acrylic on canvas, 2009, Blázquez focuses on the image of José Marti from a human perspective, elucidating the historical leading role of a significant personage, transfigured into a manipulated sacred myth by the status quo propaganda. Multiple times has Blázquez approached to the figure of the Master, always transmitting humanity, knowledge and the sparkles of a distant homeland and a re-spilt and absorbed identity in the essential - transcendental as a subterfuge of its alienated crisis. In “La revestidura del tiempo II”, acrylic on canvas, 2009, the previous obvious hieratic face demonstrates less sharpness throughout the maternal look of the Virgen de Regla, leading image of the composition, emerging full before the spectator, wrapped up by her celestial cloak and protected or escorted by the beauty of the plumage of the Peacock, explicit symbol of another saint or sister deity, equally venerated and loved by an entire nation. In this particular work, the artist uses his skills in function of the expressiveness and dramatism of the image, coming out of the rich brushstrokes of acrylic paint, emerging the xylographic face of the virgin as focal point of the composition. The fusion of both techniques defines the work of Blázquez as an engraver by academic formation and a drawer and painter by Excellencies. The virgin also is carrying in her hand the Real Palm, endemic tree of the island of Cuba, the socalled queen of the fields who raises majestic giving beauty and at the same time utility as its trunk and tufts served to farmers to build their residences. Blázquez, through his art, approaches and questions all that today means the essential attributes of a socio-cultural stiff context. He explores the variants of the already exploited cultural and national identity topics by a cosmopolitan encompassed vision, which begins with the adjustment of his conceptual previous language to the new context, the one where he nowadays lives along with the adjustment of his own person to the requirements that the new society has imposed on him. That’s the reason why his approaches does not appear to us as an absurd, in “Fragmentos sumergidos”, acrylic on canvas, 1997, as a result of the juxtaposition of cultural elements of origins and multiple meanings, he manages to construct an emblematic and multicultural figure; the represented image is revealed to us as a Mona Lisa, an urban matriarch virgin, evocation of “The freedom illuminating the world” as allegory of his own artistic and historical existence. Mundane goddess who shows between her hands the "garabato", Eleggua’s symbol of power, the instrument that he uses on his task of opening ways and that now he reveals as reminiscence of our own pilgrimage thru life.