Entropy

“… on what shore to land, what anchor to keep in the heart, if upon the foundations of the sea the afternoon is built and collapses every day?”

Raúl Hernández Novás, “Aguas”

Stricken, Playa Rosario is a place that does not exist. It barely survives, succumbing, in the patina of memory: the long potholed road, the dark water, the dust and the sun, hanging from an old summer.

There are no chance places; we come to them “to bear witness”. Luis Alberto Saldaña knew this during his stays at various points along the southern coast of Mayabeque, from which he drew the essence of the exhibition he now presents under the name “ENTROPÍA”. The places he has chosen are no pretext for rummaging in nostalgia, nor barren plots stranded in remembrance, but a plea for persistence, beyond any rending.

Always the sea, which divides; the sea, a door to the infinite; the sea caressing or rough, shadowed or luminous, as the backdrop to a body of work traversed by questions that arise from the ancestral bond between nature and man. That “immersion towards objects”, as Lezama put it – objects found by chance and given new dimensions – forms part of the conception of landscape the painter embraces. The door open to otherness; the rusted remains of a chair, stoic, before the immensity of the ocean; the old roots, stubbornly gripping the stone: icons marked by “the damned circumstance of water”, the island condition that Virgilio Piñera singled out. In-communication, waiting, the horizon, corrosion, perseverance, abandonment, the undaunted traces of time, bent on enduring, leap out of these images like a “threadbare map”, vestiges of a shipwreck of deep spiritual resonance. This system of signs makes up a cosmos to which Saldaña clings again and again, now with greater cohesion, poise and creative maturity; an accomplished exercise in which virtuosity bows, humbly, before the grandeur of an impressive visual ensemble.

Carlos Luis Molina Labrador · 2018 · Translated from the Spanish · source

If we were to start from the notion that the title of an exhibition – without having to be explanatory – ought to contain its curatorial idea or its theoretical foundation, then the title of Luis Alberto Saldaña’s latest solo show is not the most apt. I say this because of the meaning of the term ENTROPÍA (as the exhibition is called), defined as “degraded energy”, when in the show – quite the opposite – that force or power finds expression, rather, in the pictorial virtuosity of this artist from Mayabeque.

ENTROPÍA, then, is offered to us at the “Víctor Manuel” Gallery on the Plaza de la Catedral. As a song to beauty, to a landscape – Saldaña’s very own – that always takes the sea as the protagonist of his concerns; to the immensity of these waters that can do all things and, rather than “degrade”, transform everything: from a chair that once was into a strange shape of metal structures, now rusted and twisted; from a pier or a ladder, also of iron, turned into useless scaffolding that shows only desolation; to an abandoned tyre that lets itself be pierced – this time – by the liquid foam of the finite ocean as it touches the shore.

Saldaña commands oil paint the way a camera might freeze the exactness of an image, to the point that these paintings could be mistaken for photographs: a creative ingenuity born of extraordinary patience, achieving a hyperrealist iconography of lofty artistic flight.

The sea as the sea itself; the mangrove that almost lets itself be touched; the stones like gems in a setting that, were the sea not behind it, would seem lunar… The sea, always the sea, the one that now, in this show, soaks us through, that lets itself be smelt in its own salty scents…

Luis Alberto Saldaña’s ENTROPÍA, in its large-format pieces (the majority) as in its smaller works, also holds a mystery, an atmosphere of enigmas created from the very warp and weft of these canvases to cover everything: unknown, invented places, yet true in the very life the artist breathes into them, drawing on blues, greys and pinks, and many more besides, to make them vibrate…

Saldaña belongs to that legion of artists blessed in their prodigious hands: a landscape painter “per se”, one of those who stir us to the core, one of those who spread passion…

Once again he astonishes us – even though we know of these qualities – because with each exhibition Saldaña surpasses himself, and ENTROPÍA reaches the realm of mastery, without the word seeming exaggerated or alarming anyone for being so described; if you doubt it, see for yourself when you stand before the exquisiteness of this art.

Antonio Fernández Seoane · 4 March 2018 · Text for the radio programme Meridiano Cultural · Translated from the Spanish · source