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• 02 / 15 / 2010

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From its origin, before the word could tell things and that images could come out from a beings’ hands, in the early days of the Antilles and its prodigious arch, the environment was always the first thing when interpreting creatures and their needs.

The region’s early inhabitants there arrived here on canoes, and then they began amidst the hostile landscape the painting thing of their primitive idols.

But it was pretty much later, when the Earth roundness was already recognized and the Atlantic coasts were ‘found’ that the deep and decisive impact took place, when with pain and blood African deities arrived and with them, the heat of the hug with the children of the cross, the mysteries, the movings, the processes and the permutations.

With his latest personal exhibition, "Mount I am", opened at the Art Center in Holguin, painter Jorge Hidalgo invites us to enter into the thickness and verify its surroundings: to see the flight of the ringdove, to listen to the contact of the water on the pebbles of the tributary, to smell flowers’ scent, to savor the fruit that foretells the desire, and to touch the branches.

Settled down in each sense and from all them, the artist shows in this journey through his latest work, a hug that reveals the unique ownership to the intimate nature of the Island, a trip that only the nostalgia allows to compose, with trustworthy knowledge of the colors and the shapes that warned the first day of creation, when the soil, the water, the air and the fire got together so that the world could emerge, that is to say, the mount.

It is not chancy at all that Hidalgo baptized this exhibition "Mount I am" because the also engraver has been corroborating such a certainty since long ago, when intruding in intricate route that enhances the secret way of plants, animals and people cohabiting all together: a way of painting that settles down in the force of textures and lights that decipher the vegetable thing, a perception that invokes the memory as an impulse of the line on the paper, the card or the canvas, a code of knowledge in which works and conviction are based on a developing dialogue of deep passions.

Some time the great poet Gaston Baquero said on the book "The Mount" that "to feel inside and behind the ceiba tree, of the royal palm tree, of the fragrant grasses, there is a conception of the land, of the sky, of the divine powers, it is not a value that can be rejected without punishment when considering the integration of a sensibility".

On the other hand, Lydia Cabrera, whom we owe a key work of Cuban culture, points out that an old santero friend of hers and Sandoval for his last name, admitted that "we are the children of the mount because life emerged out there."

In that sense, it is worth adding that the artist's sensibility that calls himself "Mount" has a foundation in the above mentioned asseveration: the pieces that make up this exhibition are not alone the product of a "son of the mount", but also the testimony of the life that, far from closing its beginning in those sites, is endlessly discovered in its grounds.

Four years ago, for the occasion of a catalog for an exhibition inaugurated at Villa Manuela gallery, in Havana City, which then contained the painters’ latest work, it pointed out that "the ancestry of the line in the nerve of the instant, the multishaped nature like character shifting, the eye that even watches deep within creatures and encounters, the capacity to reveal (…) are noticed at each step of the route the artist goes through.”

Now you meet again those attributes in Hidalgo’s work: the stock of the feature that marks the artist overflows in force and the moment that asserts so are spread out in the features of creatures, objects and environment, a weave of evidences and allusions that allow him establish his way of reading the limits of the myth, not to illustrate it or to make it a derivation, but rather the way of an intimate learning of the mysteries that give life to the Afro-Cuban magic lineage.

The exhibition "Mount I am" invites us to the encounter with a painter in the thickness of an endless island.

Source: Radio Angulo