Kanenes Patafisicos

Kanenes Patafisicos: Carlos Puente de Ambrosio

The first time one encounters a work by Carlos Puente, one feels overwhelmed with astonishment, or better yet, with the pleasurable surrender of the gaze in following eccentric assemblies of unusual forms. One is perceptually stimulated in the attempt to organize the image on a conscious level, which in turn calls upon the imaginative.

This stimulation is intensified in a second phase through a bold chromatic range: primary colors dominate over adjacent ones, and their appeal prevails, regulating a centrifugal or purely ascensional mode of vision. But after recovering from the effect of astonishment, one needs to take a step forward and go beyond the traditional point of approach to a painting. That is, the act of standing before a painting in a space beyond our consciousness, where our gaze and thought must be renewed, crossing the line that separates us from the work and entering the iconographic fabric.

Only through breaking the classical patterns of reading the pictorial world can one enter Carlos Puente’s creative core and understand the relational system that explains its poetic and symbolic function. Because beyond its disorientingly provocative, seemingly phantasmagoric effects, Puente probes deeply, seeking a still latent drive for pure, real pictorial expression, continuously pushing the threshold of illusory or surreal representation, taking it dangerously to the limit.

Where others represent emptiness, our painter represents fullness, creating a visual-mental disorder that pushes to the extreme the wavering limits of the human condition (as an artistic reflection) in order to reach totalizing, synoptic solutions of reality. The dynamism of multi-figure compositions, the ascensional force of some works (as if striving to pierce the surface and claim the surrounding space), and the exaggeration of certain blow-up-type figures act as a counterpoint to television and press imagery, opposing the distortion of other images that assume certain formal characteristics.

Lunar landscapes take precedence over landscapes of reality, appearing both hallucinatory and dreamlike. Although color saturation participates in this solution, Carlos Puente emphasizes chromatic force to such an extent as to turn a color into a non-color. Green, red, and yellow are fully saturated and impure, appearing artificial and nonexistent in nature, yet despite this, they possess a high seductive power.

Within hyperfiguration, a product of contemporary Western culture, one finds signs of humanity’s ancestral culture. Male and female sexual attributes speak of eroticism as a passion for life and death. Middle Eastern-derived symbolism (the small glyphs that darken backgrounds, the recurrent use of arrows, etc.) and the mythological characters he invokes allude to the culture to which the artist belongs.