Presentation

Julio Figueroa Beltrán and his thematic universes

by Katherine Chacón

In the complex context of contemporaneity, painting remains an infinite field for representation. Having had to deal with the specter of its own exhaustion, as a consequence of the enthronement of unconventional practices that took place at the end of the last century, painting constantly demonstrates its inexhaustible capacity to revivify itself, by approaching and overflowing—from a critical perspective—the limits imposed on it by traditional techniques, themes and discursive strategies.

Current painting is wide and multiple; in it converge various kinds of proposals. On the formal side, there are, on the one hand, all the propositions derived from abstraction in its geometric and lyrical aspects. On the other, there are the languages linked to figuration, in which representation is meant to convey various symbolic, metaphorical, political, and many other, ideas.

The work of Julio Figueroa Beltrán (Havana, Cuba, 1984) is part of the broad horizon of figurative painting. With a solid background acquired in his hometown—at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro and the Instituto Superior de Arte (Universidad de las Artes)—Figueroa Beltrán approaches the pictorial exercise in a way that reveals its indebtedness to illustrations. For this, he stands aside from hyperrealistic solutions and, subsequently, from the seductions of achieving photographic-quality realism. He returns, rather, to the figure and the landscape, depicting them for what they are—just

representations. Figueroa Beltrán unveils the difficulties of constructing a deep image on the surface plane of a canvas.

Figueroa Beltrán's education was completed with his work at the studio of the renowned Cuban painter Julio Larraz, a defender of painting as an act of imagination.

Figueroa Beltrán's work belongs to the genealogical line in which the aspiration to realism gives way to the creation of disturbing sensations, of subtle unreality. For this reason, there is something in his painting close to De Chirico's, whose atmospheres of reverie arise from the arbitrary use of perspective and the representation of impossible architecture. They also show the influence of Edward Hopper, especially in his approach to the theme of solitude of modern man in the city.

Disturbing figurations are established in the painting of Figueroa Beltrán through his use of color, a particular construction of space and forms, and the topics depicted—these show traces of the incongruous encounters of distant realities advocated by the Surrealists. Undoubtedly, the theme of loneliness goes through all his work; the artist draws on man, nature and landscape to make them actors of a kind of existential soliloquy expressed with lyric containment.

One of his series brings together paintings representing ships sailing in an icy landscape. The pieces Study, The Endurance and Study, The Art—and others like The Mirage or The Art Shipment—share similar elements: a red schooner in the foreground crosses a greenish sea in a glacial landscape of white skies. They are images full of melancholy. As in Harry Martinson's poem Ghost Ships We Are—in which the Swedish poet compares the abandoned boats with the essentially peregrine life of the human being1—Figueroa Beltrán's red vessels seem to embody the fundamental solitude of the psyche, assumed as a huge and flowing structure. They are presences that travel without a known direction in an undifferentiated space. The titles of these pieces reveal, in addition, not only the assumption of the human condition as the destiny of an unguarded existence but also the awareness of what it means to be an artist within the framework of this defenselessness.

The winter theme reappears often in other series in which the landscape is barren, cold and lonely. In The Red Blizzard, the artist uses again drastic contrast between white—frozen—backgrounds and a reddish protagonist element, in this case a barn. The image, built with objects of disparate realities, completes its strangeness by being placed in a wind farm where close-up turbines and background trees without foliage, seem to establish a dialogue of ecological connotations. Here, the title of the work introduces a question about its meaning: Does it refer to the ecological impact of wind turbines on birds? Does it hint at global warming? Or is the artist just looking to introduce an element of accessory strangeness?
However, it should be noted that in Figueroa Beltrán, ecological concerns do not pursue the complaint. His narrative is directed, rather, to a poetic revision of what it would mean to break the coexistence among living beings. The series that we will call “Bird Houses"—in which the artist introduces the representation of these small wooden objects—seems to emphasize this interpretation.
In fact, bird houses are objects placed by man and, therefore, associated with social life. In the forest or in the open field the birds do not need them since they have their own means to procure food and shelter. Figueroa Beltrán locates his on solitary mountains, indicating that something in the natural behavior of the birds has been altered. This change upsets everything, silences everything. The solitude represented in these pieces is absolute: The bird houses are empty and there are no birds flying by them. In Study, The Sound of Winter, the warmth of the little houses (like in the barn in The Red Blizzard) is abruptly truncated by the snow of the icy landscape that surrounds it. The title alludes and accentuates the silence of winter solitude. In The Watcher, the figure of a mature man depicted from the rear appears to emphasize the longing to see that loneliness reversed. The Wait not only expresses this expectation but introduces a paradoxical purpose: Although the forests have run out of birds (through human intervention that upset the delicate natural balance), a man with a lost look waits for one to appear so that he can cage it. In this way, the work of Figueroa Beltrán also introduces a reflection on the connections existing between the exercise of freedom and the experience of solitude. The use of a restricted palate of sepias and grays, and the austere composition supported by vertical, or horizontal and vertical, intersections give these works a melancholy and mysterious character.
The abandoned city is the subject of pieces like Fast Times and Blue Lights—and also of The Speed of Happiness. The works of this series display a beautiful formal syntax in which the austerity of the elements that make them up—viaducts and skies—is energized by the wide curves of the highways, the ascending lines of the pillars, and the perspective given by the low angle presentation. This allows for the appearance of very colorful skies as backgrounds. In fact, the poetic expressiveness of color contrasts stand out in these pieces. The solitude of the city is not manifested here—as in the paintings of Hopper or De Chirico—through the representation of solitary places or characters sunk in isolation and without communication. Figueroa Beltrán takes one of the most iconic elements of the contemporary metropolis, the freeway, and shows it in an unusual state, in which the speed, the constant traffic and the permanent wakefulness of the city have been subtracted, generating an absurd and unexplainable image of an uninhabited city.
Walking into Dracaena's Forest is an openly dreamlike painting. As its name implies, it represents a wooded landscape in which several Dracaena trees stand. Known as the “Dragon Tree" for its particular conformation—the growth system of its trunk is quite different from that of other, more common tree species —and for the red liquid that flows from it that is used as a pigment and as traditional medicine—this plant is, like the legendary baobab, full of exoticism and linked to the imagery of distant worlds. Its origin, in a remote island of the Indian Ocean, reinforces its attractive strangeness.
The artist places the forest on a stony ground and under an intensely red and starry sky, which suggests the integration of an otherwordly, cosmic, dimension to his representation. In some way, this disturbing painting pays a silent tribute to the primitive sources of painting and to the original—healing—functions of art.
Formally, the painting of Julio Figueroa Beltrán is frank and direct, opposed to all conceptualism. His language updates the legacy of pictorial traditions. It takes us back to the pleasures of contemplation—to discover that representation is also an open and fertile field for reflection, imagination, enjoyment and introspection.


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Julio Figueroa Beltrán and his thematic universes

by Katherine Chacón

In the complex context of contemporaneity, painting remains an infinite field for representation. Having had to deal with the specter of its own exhaustion, as a consequence of the enthronement of unconventional practices that took place at the end of the last century, painting constantly demonstrates its inexhaustible capacity to revivify itself, by approaching and overflowing—from a critical perspective—the limits imposed on it by traditional techniques, themes and discursive strategies.

Current painting is wide and multiple; in it converge various kinds of proposals. On the formal side, there are, on the one hand, all the propositions derived from abstraction in its geometric and lyrical aspects. On the other, there are the languages linked to figuration, in which representation is meant to convey various symbolic, metaphorical, political, and many other, ideas.

The work of Julio Figueroa Beltrán (Havana, Cuba, 1984) is part of the broad horizon of figurative painting. With a solid background acquired in his hometown—at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro and the Instituto Superior de Arte (Universidad de las Artes)—Figueroa Beltrán approaches the pictorial exercise in a way that reveals its indebtedness to illustrations. For this, he stands aside from hyperrealistic solutions and, subsequently, from the seductions of achieving photographic-quality realism. He returns, rather, to the figure and the landscape, depicting them for what they are—just

representations. Figueroa Beltrán unveils the difficulties of constructing a deep image on the surface plane of a canvas.

Figueroa Beltrán's education was completed with his work at the studio of the renowned Cuban painter Julio Larraz, a defender of painting as an act of imagination.

Figueroa Beltrán's work belongs to the genealogical line in which the aspiration to realism gives way to the creation of disturbing sensations, of subtle unreality. For this reason, there is something in his painting close to De Chirico's, whose atmospheres of reverie arise from the arbitrary use of perspective and the representation of impossible architecture. They also show the influence of Edward Hopper, especially in his approach to the theme of solitude of modern man in the city.

Disturbing figurations are established in the painting of Figueroa Beltrán through his use of color, a particular construction of space and forms, and the topics depicted—these show traces of the incongruous encounters of distant realities advocated by the Surrealists. Undoubtedly, the theme of loneliness goes through all his work; the artist draws on man, nature and landscape to make them actors of a kind of existential soliloquy expressed with lyric containment.

One of his series brings together paintings representing ships sailing in an icy landscape. The pieces Study, The Endurance and Study, The Art—and others like The Mirage or The Art Shipment—share similar elements: a red schooner in the foreground crosses a greenish sea in a glacial landscape of white skies. They are images full of melancholy. As in Harry Martinson's poem Ghost Ships We Are—in which the Swedish poet compares the abandoned boats with the essentially peregrine life of the human being1—Figueroa Beltrán's red vessels seem to embody the fundamental solitude of the psyche, assumed as a huge and flowing structure. They are presences that travel without a known direction in an undifferentiated space. The titles of these pieces reveal, in addition, not only the assumption of the human condition as the destiny of an unguarded existence but also the awareness of what it means to be an artist within the framework of this defenselessness.

The winter theme reappears often in other series in which the landscape is barren, cold and lonely. In The Red Blizzard, the artist uses again drastic contrast between white—frozen—backgrounds and a reddish protagonist element, in this case a barn. The image, built with objects of disparate realities, completes its strangeness by being placed in a wind farm where close-up turbines and background trees without foliage, seem to establish a dialogue of ecological connotations. Here, the title of the work introduces a question about its meaning: Does it refer to the ecological impact of wind turbines on birds? Does it hint at global warming? Or is the artist just looking to introduce an element of accessory strangeness?
However, it should be noted that in Figueroa Beltrán, ecological concerns do not pursue the complaint. His narrative is directed, rather, to a poetic revision of what it would mean to break the coexistence among living beings. The series that we will call “Bird Houses"—in which the artist introduces the representation of these small wooden objects—seems to emphasize this interpretation.
In fact, bird houses are objects placed by man and, therefore, associated with social life. In the forest or in the open field the birds do not need them since they have their own means to procure food and shelter. Figueroa Beltrán locates his on solitary mountains, indicating that something in the natural behavior of the birds has been altered. This change upsets everything, silences everything. The solitude represented in these pieces is absolute: The bird houses are empty and there are no birds flying by them. In Study, The Sound of Winter, the warmth of the little houses (like in the barn in The Red Blizzard) is abruptly truncated by the snow of the icy landscape that surrounds it. The title alludes and accentuates the silence of winter solitude. In The Watcher, the figure of a mature man depicted from the rear appears to emphasize the longing to see that loneliness reversed. The Wait not only expresses this expectation but introduces a paradoxical purpose: Although the forests have run out of birds (through human intervention that upset the delicate natural balance), a man with a lost look waits for one to appear so that he can cage it. In this way, the work of Figueroa Beltrán also introduces a reflection on the connections existing between the exercise of freedom and the experience of solitude. The use of a restricted palate of sepias and grays, and the austere composition supported by vertical, or horizontal and vertical, intersections give these works a melancholy and mysterious character.
The abandoned city is the subject of pieces like Fast Times and Blue Lights—and also of The Speed of Happiness. The works of this series display a beautiful formal syntax in which the austerity of the elements that make them up—viaducts and skies—is energized by the wide curves of the highways, the ascending lines of the pillars, and the perspective given by the low angle presentation. This allows for the appearance of very colorful skies as backgrounds. In fact, the poetic expressiveness of color contrasts stand out in these pieces. The solitude of the city is not manifested here—as in the paintings of Hopper or De Chirico—through the representation of solitary places or characters sunk in isolation and without communication. Figueroa Beltrán takes one of the most iconic elements of the contemporary metropolis, the freeway, and shows it in an unusual state, in which the speed, the constant traffic and the permanent wakefulness of the city have been subtracted, generating an absurd and unexplainable image of an uninhabited city.
Walking into Dracaena's Forest is an openly dreamlike painting. As its name implies, it represents a wooded landscape in which several Dracaena trees stand. Known as the “Dragon Tree" for its particular conformation—the growth system of its trunk is quite different from that of other, more common tree species —and for the red liquid that flows from it that is used as a pigment and as traditional medicine—this plant is, like the legendary baobab, full of exoticism and linked to the imagery of distant worlds. Its origin, in a remote island of the Indian Ocean, reinforces its attractive strangeness.
The artist places the forest on a stony ground and under an intensely red and starry sky, which suggests the integration of an otherwordly, cosmic, dimension to his representation. In some way, this disturbing painting pays a silent tribute to the primitive sources of painting and to the original—healing—functions of art.
Formally, the painting of Julio Figueroa Beltrán is frank and direct, opposed to all conceptualism. His language updates the legacy of pictorial traditions. It takes us back to the pleasures of contemplation—to discover that representation is also an open and fertile field for reflection, imagination, enjoyment and introspection.

When was Julio Figueroa Beltran born?

The year of birth of the artist is: 1984