ROBERTO MARQUEZ
INTRODUCTION
Of all the nations of Latin America, Mexico has the most consistent tradition in figurative painting. The names of the tres grandes-the three great Mexican mural painters, Diego Rivera (1886-1957), Jose Orozco (1883-1949), and David Siqueiros (1896-1974)-have dominated the history of Mexican twenieth-century art. More recently their reputations have been joined, rivaled, and even to some extent overshadowed by that of Rivera's wife, Frida Kahlo (1907-54), whose autobiographical paintings, modest in scale but singularly intense in feeling, have made her a feminist icon, Roberto Márquez (b. 1959) owes something to all of these: Yet he also stands aside from them, as a distinct artistic personality.
One reason for this is the fact that he has chosen the path of exile, Exile is a condition familiar to Latin-American artists, who have chosen to leave their countries for a variety of reasons: to further their artistic education; out of economic necessity; or, sometimes, in response to political pressure. Looking at Márquez’s work, however, and listening to him speak about it, one feels that he was an exile from the first. Even his earliest painting shows a hunger for cultural experiences, and cultural complexities that would not have been available to him had he remained in Mexico.
Márquez has always been an unashamedly literary painter, His early studies were as closely connected with literature as they were with the visual arts. He began by taking classes in sculpture at the Escuela de Artes Plasticas in Guadalajara. He then studied architecture, while simultaneously attending a literary workshop and making illustrations. He also studied poetry for two years at the Taller de Literatura Elias Nandino. His first participation in a group show was with the members of this literary group.
At a time when artists have often been at some pains to hide their possession of a complex culture, Márquez has been happy to offer evidence of it. His work refers not only to great writers-Wallace Stevens, Jorge Luis Borges, Fernando Pessoa, and most recently, Dante Alighieri, one of the greatest of them all-but to architects such as Aldo Rossi; to composers ranging from Thomas Tallis to Franz Schubert; and to other painters, both famous and comparatively obscure.
His own complex, melancholic, self-probing, and self-judging personality is the point of reference to which all these sources and allusions relate. In one sense Márquez is a traditionalist-in that he uses a traditional means of making images: paint on canvas with occasional ventures into three-dimensional work.
For some critics and curators, this puts him beyond the pale: he cannot be "contemporary" in their limited sense of that word. Why they ask, isn't he making videos and environments, or doing performances?
In another deeper sense Márquez could not be more specifically of our own time. One of the problems for the art of the present I that it has largely lost its grip on areas of subject matter which everyone, spectators and artists alike, used to have in common. For example, artists are no longer employed to tell the Christian story or to illustrate the great works of the Western literary canon. Márquez is in certain ways an exception to this, especially in his recent series of illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy.
Even these, however, have been given an extremely personal twist. In a letter to me Márquez wrote, “Even though you may recognize some direct references to previous illustrations of this work, I wanted very much to add a deep sense of irony into the works, as well as to illustrate a more personal journey- appropriating Dante's explorations for my own midlife crisis." In other words, the commentary on Dante has become part of the artist's autobiography.
What holds the illustrations in this book together is the fact that, with very rare exceptions, they are confessional. They speak directly and unashamedly from the heart and are the reflection of a single specific life-experience. In one sense, this is not surprising. The ability to open themselves up to the audience in this way is a quality that we value in artists-we find this in Picasso, above all others; we also find it in the major Expressionists and Surrealists; we find it in Arshile Gorky and Francis Bacon. We even endeavor to find it in artists where its presence is not completely obvious, for example in the work of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman.
What Márquez refuses to subscribe to is the myth that the contemporary audience is either by definition ignorant or wishes to be thought of as ignorant. He has no intention of reducing the level at which he communicates to ground zero. One can explain this, in part at least, by turning to one concept that is fundamental to what he does. He puts great stress on the importance of dreams and dreaming, and it is profitable to think of his paintings and sculptures as reflections of dream states.
MEXICO TO ARIZONA
1984-88
The earliest painting illustrated in this book, Después del diluvio (1984), dates from the year after Roberto Márquez decided to pursue a full-time career as a painter, having found architecture insufficiently fulfilling. It is in some ways a curious work: a figurative painting without a figure. All it shows is an empty room with a discarded knife lying on the floor. Márquez says that it was influenced by the work of Balthus (1908-2001), and by his contacts with the poets with whom he was in touch at that time.
Tile knife suggests a link with the next painting, EI sueno de Charlotte (1985). "Charlotte" is Charlotte Corday17 8-93), who stabbed the revolutionary Jean Paul Marat (1743-93) to death in his bath. Here, however it is a female figure who bathes, while another female-a surrogate for the spectator-is seen approaching in a mirror placed over a table. On the table the knife of Después del diluvio reappears.
The Memory of the Fish introduces a theme that persists throughout Márquez’s work: dreams and dreaming. It was painted soon after he moved to the United States in 1985 and echoes, he says, his nostalgia for Mexico, which he had recently abandoned. A similar feeling of nostalgia pervades The Somnambulist (1986), Teoría del oso (1986), and Debilidad de la noche (1986). Márquez points to influence from the work of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) in these paintings. This is especially apparent in Debilidad de la noche, perhaps because of the presence of the horse as a major element. One is also conscious of the impact of Diego Rivera. The man wearing a bear's head in Teoría del oso can be referred to certain figures in Rivera's celebrated cycle of murals at the Palacio de Cortes in Cuernavaca.
One very Mexican element in Márquez’s art has always been his sense of irony El trinche (1986)-the word is Latin-American Spanish for a fork, but more usually a table fork than the kind of hay-rake shown here-is, the artist says, a parody of the Annunciation. The Virgin is a female nude who provocatively waves her panties at the angel, who has been transformed into a snarling dog. A different dog, but one with a similar meaning, appears in The Dog of the Angelus (1987), where it accompanies a seminude female who is vigorously ringing a church bell. For Márquez, the dog represents an element of danger.
Literary influences were very powerful in Márquez’s work at this time, and the range of reference is astonishingly wide. There Were No Roses in the Cool Cafe (1986) takes its title from a poem by Wallace
Stevens (1879-1955) about the destruction of the city of Pompeii. Painted soon after the great earthquake in Mexico City, the picture incorporates a typically oblique allusion to a major contemporary event.
The Salamander's Dream (1987) is based on a popular song. The use of lettering, employed simply here, was to be developed further in many other paintings.
Este que ves engaño colorido (1987) is more complex. The title comes from a poem by the mystical poet Sor Juana de la Cruz (1651-95), the Mexican nun who was one of the first great poets of Latin America. The lion that the woman holds on a leash may refer to Etruscan art.
The final picture in this first group, which represents Márquez’s earliest maturity as an artist, is called
Codex Gluteum (1988). It shows a young man, closely resembling the artist himself-all Márquez’s male figures are related to his own appearance-kneeling on the ground playing a small portable organ. The musical score he reads is imprinted on the buttocks of his female companion, hence the title. Márquez recalls that in the famous Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) musicians are shown being tormented by their own instruments.
ARIZONA TO NEW YORK
1988-1991
The painting that begins this section, Portrait of Stephane and Michael (1989), is one of the few directly commissioned works that Márquez has made: a double portrait of an art collector and his younger partner. In dealing with the idea of the collection itself, Márquez makes use of a characteristically witty device-the paintings are represented by simple rectangles on the wall, each with an artist's name written inside it. With sly irony, this suggests that the works are valued more for their authorship than for what they actually look like.
Another "painting about painting," To Paint is a Secret Abyss (1989), is more straightforward. It is Márquez's response to the work of an artist very different from himself, the short-lived Frenchman Yves Klein (1928-62). It shows one of Klein's characteristic blue monochromes hanging on a wall, being saluted by a man with a trumpet. Klein was deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism and cultivated a willed passivity as a response to the complexity of visual phenomena. This is far from being Márquez's own attitude, but it is something he can respect.
The paintings Juego de espejos (1989) and Dancing with My Shadow (1989) are emblematic of a second uprooting in the life of Márquez: the move from Arizona to New York. The latter work was painted while the artist was still living in Arizona, as were Homesick (1989) and Miura Malandrino (1989). The Arizona pictures also look back to Mexico: Dancing With My Shadow features a guitar, the typical instrument of Mexican popular music; Homesick shows the artist confronted by a mythical white horse, which seems to urge him not to make the move, for on the wall behind the horse are the words "Don't go" and "Mexico," as if his native country were calling him back.
Juego de espejos is remembered by the artist as being one of the first paintings that he made after arriving in New York. In the image he refers once again to the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, who was as fascinated by mirrors as he was by labyrinths; Márquez describes the work as being "like a pantomime." Evidently it is emblematic of his feeling of displacement at this time-of the sense of unreality that made him feel, not like a real person, but like an actor in a play. In any case, Márquez's imagery has an innate theatricality. His paintings are also frozen dramas, often with himself as protagonist.
No puedo verte (1989) reverts to the image of an architectural model of a Mexican church, which made an earlier appearance in The Immigrant. Here the model is broken: one spire has tumbled to the ground, while the figure seated next to it gazes at himself in a mirror, holding it close to his face with an expression of anguish. The playacting of Juego de espejos has now become something deeply uneasy, as Márquez realizes that he is moving further and further away from his roots. EI Golem II (1990) and Augurio (1990) are paintings from Márquez's early period in New York. The former refers both to the strong Jewish element in New York culture and to the fact that there is a -strain of Jewish blood in Márquez's own family.
Le Regret d'Herectite (1990) returns to the imagery of Juego de espejos-the title once again coming from Borges. And Torquemada (1991) is a savagely ironic comment on the quincentenary of Columbus's discovery of America, which was impending when the painting was made. In these paintings of the very early 1990s Márquez has achieved the fully developed symbolic language that was to inform his work during the rest of a tumultuous decade.
EARLY DAYS IN NEW YORK
1991-1993
Márquez's paintings made during his first years in New York have a strong apocalyptic coloring. A good example is La noche del cometa (1993), which shows the painter's surrogate, wearing his characteristic striped trousers, standing alone in a nocturnal desert setting, while the comet of the title blazes near the horizon. For the artist this has a special significance, since tradition records that Montezuma II (1466-1520), the Aztec king betrayed and captured by Hernan Cortes (1485-1587), saw a comet predicting calamity for himself and his people.
In Los fantasmas de mediodía (1991) Márquez offers a different approach. Five self-portraits are arranged in the form of an equal-armed cross-the "ghosts of midday" of the title, who are also the emblems of a pervasive melancholy. They represent different aspects of the same temperament. These little portraits can be related to the Mexican tradition of retablos, or small votive paintings made for churches, either to request some benefit or to give thanks for one.
Other painting s that resemble these retablos, thou g h they have more elaborate com positions, are San Miguel, supuesto arcángel (1991) and Parerga und Paralipomena (1992). The former is directly related to Márquez's childhood experiences, since this saint is the patron of the place where he was born, and on St. Michael's Day, in September, a big festival takes place there. But Pererqa und Paralipomena is less simple than it looks. Parerga und Paralipomena is the title that the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) gave to a volume of his collected essays. Some of the ideas found in this seem very likely to appeal to Márquez-for example: "In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods" (On the Wisdom of Life, Aphorisms).
Márquez must certainly be one of the painters of his generation who has read most widely. Another literary source on which he drew at this time was Les Vies Imaginaires by Marcel Schwob (1867-1905), published in 1896. Part fact, part fable, and written somewhat in the manner of Oscar Wilde, this is probably Schwab’s best-known book. For some reason, Schwob's work attracted the attention of Mexican intellectuals in the 1970s, which may account for Márquez's knowledge and interest. One of the lives is that of the Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello (1397-1475), and Márquez has drawn on it for two paintings, EI sueño de Brunelleschi (1991) and Selvaggia posa para Paolo Uccello (1992). The latter work refers to Uccello's companion, who eventually-according to Schwob-died of starvation because of his neglect. She is holding aloft a geometrical model based on a mazzocchio, one of the wooden rings that Florentines of the early Renaissance period used as a basis for their cloth headdresses. Uccello was fascinated by this ring like form and created endless perspective variations on it.
The theme of this painting-unsuccessful relationships due to the artist's obsession with his work- surfaces in a number of other paintings made at this' time, for example in Le Bateau Ivre (1992), EI sueño de la mujer de Lot (1993), and EI juego del fuego (1993). Le Bateau Ivre takes its title from the famous poem by Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), the rebellious urchin who, almost single-handedly, changed the course of French poetry and created the climate in which the Symbolist movement would develop. However, Márquez's image deliberately denies the wildness of Rimbaud's words. Márquez shows an indoor scene where a nude woman suspends a model ship strung on a rope above a sleeping man. The implication is that it is she who is urging him toward the dream and he who remains incapable of seizing it.
SMALL SCULPTURES
1993
Many painters seem to need to take an occasional break from the business of painting. The sequence of small sculptures reproduced in this section, all dating from the year 1993, represents just such a pause in the steady progression of Roberto Márquez's work. Márquez calls them "sculptures," but in fact they hover in a kind of technical no-man's land-they are simultaneously reliefs, collages, and reliquaries. In the context of American art they can be seen as having something in common with the box- constructions of Joseph Cornell (1903-73), being made of heterogeneous materials on a similarly modest scale. They also have something in common with Mexican religious folk art.
The title of each of these works implies the existence of some kind of hidden narrative-narratives that, on the whole, are a lot more obscure than those to be found in Márquez's paintings. There are, not surprisingly, a number of literary allusions. Souvenirs from Nerval's Last Day (1993) refers to the French nineteenth-century poet Gerard de Nerval (1808-55), a leading figure in the Romantic movement, who suffered from intermittent fits of madness and hanged himself at the age of 47. Nerval is generally regarded as the predecessor of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) and as the ultimate poetic misfit, who described himself as "Ie ténébreux, Ie veuf, l'inconsolé" ("the shadowy one, the widower, the unconsoled"). Found Brush of Gregorio Monge, Self- Taught Painter (1993) may or may not refer to the prominent Catalan journalist of that name (1892-1981). There are also references to the Bible: to the story of Lot, his wife, and his daughters; and to Simon Magus, the false prophet and magician who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts viii, 9-29) and in the apocryphal text the "Acts of St. Peter." According to this, Simon tried to win over the Emperor Nero through the exercise of magic arts, offering to ascend to heaven before the emperor's eyes and those of the Roman populace. However, the prayers of St. Peter and St. Paul, who were present, caused him to fall, injure himself, and die miserably.
Finally there are references to other artists: to the leading Surrealist, Max Ernst (1891-1976); and to the German painter, sculptor, and printmaker Max Klinger (1857-1920) in some of his print cycles, notably The History of a Glove (1881), which shows a lost glove in a series of unlikely situations. In one image, Abduction, the glove is shown being carried away by a monstrous pterodactyl-like creature. Klinger was a kind of forerunner of Surrealism, and clearly it is this aspect of .his work that appeals to Márquez and forms the inspiration for Max Klinger's Other Glove (1993).
The main theme of this set of reliefs, however, seems to be death and the fear of death. In many of them the principal image is a face, which looks either like a mummy mask or the actual visage of a mummy. These faces are often covered in cloth, which resembles funerary bandages. In two works, the mask is associated with coins. Eight Coins Among Which is Contained the Denary of Destiny (1993) shows these coins spilling out of the mouth of the mask-one recalls the early funerary custom of putting a coin in the mouth of the deceased, so that he or she could pay for passage over the River Styx and into the Underworld. Flowers that Covered Simon Magus After His Fall (1993) has two coins covering the eyes of a bandaged face, in reference to another common funerary custom.
THE MID 1990’s
1994-1995
The paintings from 1993-5 included in this section have much greater intensity than some of Márquez's earlier work. Part of this intensity is purely erotic-many of the pictures are explorations of the theme of female mystery, and in some of these women are shown in cages. In The Red Cage (1994), for example, the nude female figure is not only placed behind a mesh, but has a dappled skin and is entwined with a rope. Around her are various objects that look like, but do not really correspond to, the Instruments of the Passion portrayed in some traditional religious works: the lace, the sponge, the nails used to fasten Christ to the cross, and so on-including a pair of callipers and a pair of shears. There is the sense that women are uncontrollable, but also victims. La mujer serpiente (1995)-a life-sized sculpture rather than a painting-carries the animal imagery of The Red Cage to a conclusion by conflating Eve with the serpent who tempted her.
Another powerful current in the paintings of this time is that of religion. One image alludes to traditional representations of St. Agnes (Agnese, 1995), who’s hair grew so long as to conceal her nakedness from her persecutors. Márquez's characteristic angels reappear in different forms. Ángel vampiro (1995), another life-sized sculpture, is closely related to Mexican church sculptures of the baroque period, while Ángel de las perlas (1994) is deliberately abstracted behind a screen of dots. Often this insistent patterning seems to be employed as a means of removing what is represented from full reality. This is conspicuously the case with La silla (1995), in which the figure seems to exist behind a screen made of lace, and with La memoria de la silla (1995), where it is partly obscured, not only by an insistent checkerboard pattern but by the words of a poem written by one of Márquez's friends, Jorge Esquinca. Though the poem speaks of tranquility-"La silla es un sedimento de la quietud" ("The chair is a sediment of quiet")-the atmosphere of the painting is deeply uneasy.
This feeling of disquiet appears in clearer form in two paintings that seem to be about guilt: I Will Pray for You (1994), in which a sleeping figure who is clearly a surrogate for the artist himself is shown being entwined with a rope by a kneeling female; and Te juzgaremos ("We will pronounce sentence upon you," 1994), in which two nude women stare out at the spectator. One wears an angel's wings; the other holds a crown of thorns, ready (it is clear) to place it on the artist's head.
Paintings of this sort are linked to others where the personal meaning is perhaps less clear. Two master compositions of this time are II Poverello (1995), a personal reinterpretation of the legend of St. Francis, and Transverberatio (1995), which Márquez links to Gianlorenzo Bernini's famous image of St. Teresa in Ecstasy (1647 -52).
There is also a sequence of images that are self-portraits, often with some kind of religious subtext. A la una yo nací(1994) takes its title from a line in a Sephardic Jewish song and stands at the beginning of the self-portrait series. The ropes surrounding the artist-and still more so the inverted clock above his head-imply that the times are out of joint for him, while the trickle of blood from his nose is emblematic of sickness within. La noche del infiel (1995) is rooted in Nerval's poem "EI Desdichado" ("The Unfortunate One"). Written in reverse lettering on the artist's T-shirt are Márquez's translation of Nerval's words: "Soy el viudo" ("I am the widower"). And in EI viudo (1995) Márquez portrays himself as the risen Christ displaying the stigmata in an image derived from Pietro Perugino (c. 1450-1523).
MUSIC AND ART
1996-1998
The final image in the preceding section, Cruzando un río (1995), supplies a link to the sequence that follows. Roberto Márquez says that he has always associated water with dreams, and this painting implies some kind of transition from one mood or state to another.
The range of cultural reference to be found in the paintings of the mid-1990s is wider than ever. Diderot Unplugged(1996), for example, makes use of images borrowed from one of the illustrations in the great French eighteenth-century Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot (1713-84). One of the fascinations of the Encyclopédie is the huge range of tools and occupations documented in its multitude of engravings. Las bodas de Philidor (1996) celebrates the marriage of another figure of the same epoch, Francois-Andre Philidor (1726-95), a successful composer of comic operas who was also the greatest chess player of his day. It is perhaps characteristic of Márquez that the architectural setting in this painting has nothing to do with the epoch of Philidor himself, but closely resembles Charlemagne's Sainte Chapelle in Aachen, built a thousand years previously.
Music plays an important part in this group of paintings. Two of which bear the title Spem in Alium (1996 and 1997), borrowed from the celebrated 40-part motet by the English Elizabethan composer Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-85). The words, as well as the music itself, seem to have had an appeal for the painter: "I have never put my hope in any other but you." In one of these paintings Márquez sits at a table covered with books and papers and is contemplated by a ferocious Aztec mask; the other appears to show an old- fashioned subway train in a tunnel. And Lachrymae Antiquae, showing a statue of the Madonna and child in a niche, takes its name from another Elizabethan composition, this time one by John Dowland (I' 63-1 2 ). This piece is the first and most famous in Dowland's only collection of instrumental music, Lachrimae or Seven Teares (1603-4).
The music that seems to mean most to Márquez, however, is Franz Schubert's famous song cycle Winterreise, setting poems by Wilhelm Muller (1794-1827). This lends its title to a painting of 1997, which, with its bold use of empty space, marks a new departure in Márquez's art. Márquez has said that the vast romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) were a powerful influence on him at this time.
Márquez's wide-ranging curiosity, in terms of art as well as music, is certified by another choice of model: the strange, eccentric architectural painter Francois de Nome (fl. 1610-20), a Frenchman who worked in Naples. He was the inspiration for Lamentations of Jeremiah (1997), a large canvas that shows the New York skyscrapers illuminated by a fireworks display. De Nome may also be the source for Oficio de tinieblas (1996), an equally large painting, which shows a tiny Márquez figure standing in front of Manuel Tolsa's Hospicio Cabanas in Guadalajara.
One of the striking aspects of Márquez's art is the way in which he reverses our expectations. New York and Guadalajara are alienated, sinister places; while that most banal of subjects, a figure on a beach, becomes an excuse for a religious composition. In EI libro de las horas perdidas (1997) a nude woman is sunbathing, surrounded by books. But the warning inscription, taken from the burial service, gives a serious tone to her self- abandonment: "Eternal rest grant them, 0 Lord/and let perpetual light shine upon them." In Manus Tuas (1997) might be simply a picture of a man taking the sun. But the title instructs us to look at it in another way: this a castaway, a man at the end of his tether: "Into thy hands, 0 Lord, I commend my spirit."
CRISIS AND RECOVERY
1998-2000
In the late 1990s Roberto Márquez suffered a physical crisis: he had to undergo major heart surgery. This was followed by an emotional crisis: the collapse of a major personal relationship. Not surprisingly, the paintings that he made at this time reflect the turmoil he was experiencing. In some ways, his art predicted aspects of the crisis before it made itself known to him. Aves de corazón (1998) in the previous section was, he says, painted before he knew he had a problem with his heart.
Some of the paintings made in response to the events that overtook Márquez are reflective; while others are more emotional. EI doble (1999), for instance, reflects upon the old superstition that to encounter your own double is a premonition of death. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-92), the English Pre-Raphaelite, used the same theme in one of his best-known watercolors And So They Met Themselves. Ausente a mis memorias (1998), which echoes aspects of the earlier Lamentations of Jeremiah with its towering buildings and its display of fireworks in the distance, shows a little Márquez figure kneeling in a deserted New York avenue, as if praying frantically for deliverance in church. This deliverance is celebrated in The Repentant Lazarus (1999).
The mood of The Road From Damascus (1998) is even more euphoric. Here the artist's surrogate flies joyfully above a desert road that nevertheless seems to lead on toward the future. But perhaps the most impressive of all these paintings about the imminence of death and eventual escape is Después del juicio (1998). The scene represented shows the painter as the sole survivor after some kind of Last Judgement; he sits on an empty tomb and looks thoughtfully at the scattered, lifted slabs, which imply that thousands of others have been resurrected to meet their fate. The painting demonstrates Márquez’s skill ill creating imaginary architectural constructions, and his extraordinary gift for inventing telling visual metaphors to echo and make accessible essentially private situations.
This is also the case with the paintings of this time that are meditations on death but also about sexuality. The Ways of the Zebra (1998) reverts to a favorite image-that of woman as some kind of untamed wild animal, mysteriously self-contained and unknowable. Márquez says that the painting speaks of eroticism as a means of escape from death. An even greater sense of wildness can be found in La estética del mal (1998), which takes its title from a poem by Wallace Stevens, "L'esthétique du mal," and which seems to compare female emotions to an erupting volcano. This view of women even enters into a work that, Márquez says, was painted for an exhibition of still lifes. In The Burning Apple(1999) an Eve-like nude holds the dangerous fruit of the title, while more apples are heaped at her feet.
Meanwhile, Márquez's play with musical, literary, and artistic allusions continues. The Phantom Suns (1999) borrows an image from winteireise; The Wet "Season in Hell" (1999) returns to Rimbaud-this time to the sequence of prose poems entitled "Une Saison en enfer;" and The Theory of King David (1999) alludes to Caravaggio's famous painting of David and Goliath, in which the head of Goliath is a self-portrait of the artist.
Somewhat exceptional in this group is the huge three-panel painting The Devil's Sonata (1999). The title is taken from the well-known violin sonata by Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770), "The Devil's Trill," said to have been composed after Tartini heard the Devil playing it in a dream. The image, with its trail of footprints Ieading to a restless ocean, carries with it the idea of being for ever lost in dreams.
NEW WAYS OF SEEING
2000
The paintings presented in this section continue themes already announced in Márquez's work of the late 1990s. Frozen Fire (2000) is the last painting in the sequence devoted to Schubert's "Winterreise" song cycle. In the Forest of the Zebra(2000) is a variation on the earlier The Ways of the Zebra (1998), but now the woman is aroused and triumphantly brandishes the serpent of temptation. This is only one of quite a large group of works devoted to the theme of eroticism; others are The Tiger's Garden (2000), Secret Flower (2000), and La otra primavera (2000). The artist describes this series as "a mixture of pessimism and hope" and says that the renewed interest in eroticism that they display is charged with a sense of mortality.
These paintings are closely linked to Vagaries of Spring (2000), which shows the artist standing on the head of a giant version of himself, which is slowly emerging from the soil. The image is symbolic of a renewal of hope, and of emergence from a period of emotional and sexual turmoil. The blossoming trees are painted with loving finesse-they are like the trees found in romantic early nineteenth-century Indian miniatures of the Kangra School, which often show lovers surrounded by lush plants and flowers that seem to respond to human passions.
Two paintings, Galileo's Riddle (2000) and The Storm (2000), speak of the new forms of seeing that science has made possible and, by implication, new forms of vision operating in the artist's own life. Galileo's Riddle refers to one of the most famous of the Italian scientist's discoveries, which occurred in 1610, when he bought a thirty-power telescope and observed the presence of four moons circling Jupiter, whose existence had been unknown to astronomers. It is significant that in his painting Márquez gives this a visionary twist: the figure in his painting who observes these moons is, by implication, seated on the surface of Jupiter itself.
Perhaps the most significant work in this section is Drunken Monkey (2000), which takes its imagery from the first Canto of Dante's Divine Comedy (as translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow):
And lo! almost where the ascent began,
A panther light and swift exceedingly,
Which with a spotted skin was covered 0 'er!
And never moved she from before my face,
Nay rather did impede so much my way,
That many times I to return had turned.
The time was the beginning of the morning,
And up the sun was mounting with those stars
That with him were, what time the Love Divine
At first in motion set those beauteous things;
So were to me occasion of good hope,
The variegated skin of that wild beast,
The hour of time, and the delicious season,'
But not so much that did not give me fear
A lion's aspect which appeared to me.
This looks forward to the magnificent series of illustrations to Dante with which this book concludes.
At one point, when we were discussing this book and the way in which it would try to illuminate his career as an artist, Márquez said to me, "I think I imagine Paradise in the form of a museum." It is clearly true that he is one of the most learned of contemporary artists-an impassioned explorer, not only of the visual arts, but of literature and music. Yet it is not so much his cultural range that is impressive, as his impassioned commitment to the life of the mind. This is an artist for whom thought and emotion are in fact inseparable processes.
DANTE’S “DIVINE COMEDY”
2001
Roberto Márquez's most recent enterprise, made as this book was going to press, is a remarkable series of miniature illustrations to Dante's Divine Commedia. There are seven images for each section:
"Inferno," "Purgatorio," and "Paradiso." They are painted on parchment, just like medieval illuminations, and each is only 6x2 x 4x2 in/16.5 x 11.4 cm, in total contrast to the generally large scale of his work in oil on canvas. The first image in each section is a self-portrait; this is followed by others that reply to Dante's narrative. However, as the artist himself points out, the match is not exact. In a letter to me he wrote, "Even though you may recognize some direct references to previous illustrations ..., I wanted very much to add a deep sense of irony ..., as well as to illustrate a more personal journey-appropriating Dante's explorations for my own mid-life crisis." Hence, for example, the transformation of the protagonist into a Mexican mariachi player, complete with sombrero and guitar, in some of the illustrations to the "Paradiso."
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) has, of course, been illustrated by a large number of artists, some of them very distinguished. They include Botticelli, William Blake (who, like Márquez, distanced himself from part of Dante's content, since he disagreed with its theology), John "Mad" Martin, Gustave Dore, and Salvador Dali. Márquez admits to having looked at and been influenced by some of these. There is a striking resemblance, for example, between his version of the punishment of the Simoniacs in the "Inferno" (Canto XIX) and Blake's vision of the same thing. However, one has to remember that Dante's own description of this episode is extremely precise.
In general terms, the artist who has most influenced Márquez is none of those named above, but the Sienese master Giovanni di Paolo (1403-83), the author of a set of illustrations now at the British Library. Márquez says that he was particularly struck by Giovanni's version of the "Paradiso," which is the section I that most illustrators have found difficult, because its imagery is transcendental and therefore much more abstract than that of the two previous sections.
Though Márquez's rendering of some episodes remains close to the poem-in addition to the punishment of the Simoniacs in the "Inferno," one can cite his version of the Wood of Suicides (also in the "Inferno") and the Terrace of the Prideful, condemned to carry heavy stones on their backs (Canto X of the "Purgatorio")-there are nevertheless striking divergences. One is the almost complete absence of Virgil, who serves as Dante's guide throughout the first two-thirds of his pilgrimage. Beatrice, who accompanies Dante on his journey through Paradise, is more insistently present, but is represented nude-something that would no doubt have shocked Dante to the core.
There are two remarkable things about the whole series, which Márquez has baptized La Comedia Apócrifa. One is the way in which it revives a medieval tradition that most people believed to be long defunct. It is true that somewhat similar efforts were occasionally made by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Britain in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, but these designs have a much greater directness and purity of vision-qualities typical of medieval art. The other remarkable thing is the way in which this new Com media mingles autobiography in seamless fashion with Dante's text. Márquez is not merely commentating on Dante; he is offering a commentary on his own fate. He is present throughout the designs, even going so far as to offer his own portrait as the Face of God when Dante and Beatrice finally reach the Ninth Heaven, the ultimate region of Paradise.
Edward Lucie Smith