Dr. Eloisa Johnson | acfoundation

Revelations: The Journey

Success is not to be measured by the position someone has reached in life, but the obstacles he has overcome while trying to succeed.

― Booker T. Washington

Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

― Lao Tzu

Introduction:

Life is an arduous journey with many roads and pathways to travel. The Buddhist proverb that states “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” has a profound meaning for the life and career of Antonio Carreño. At the end of each journey or mile marker on the way, there are “revelations” that act as the keys to knowledge of who we are and the lessons we learn from each step.

Antonio Carreño’s journey of discovery and “revelation” begins in the Caribbean and continues with his migration to the United States. But his sense of “place,” memories, and heart and soul still reside there—the Caribbean, where his artistic steps began and continued in America. While here, he has made many friends along the way who have taught him valuable lessons about art and life and led him by example to a richer understanding of what it means to live a life under grace. Carreño’s art exudes that grace, textural surfaces and vibrant colors that call to a deeper place i reds, yellows, greens and blue hues that send out mystical vibrations to anyone who stares into their depths.

Carreño, like other Caribbean artists is influenced by the diversity of Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and European heritages that results in a hybrid of cultural influences. Yet, he has a unique style that reflects the social, cultural and environmental impact of the Caribbean on his art and sensibilities.

Carreño’s work is reminiscent of Joan Miro’s, the surrealist painter. Neither literal nor specific in his presentation, Miro reminisced about the Catalan landscape and its “empty spaces” and “vastness” and used them as a recurring motif in his work. “Empty spaces, horizons, empty plains even those which are bare have always impressed me,” confessed Miro.

Carreño is nostalgic, too, about his childhood in his homeland. Like Miro, he titillates our senses and memories with his canvases. Unlike Miro, though, Carreño’s canvases are not completely “empty.” Deep Blue resembles a landscape with a luminescent blue sky and a deep blue sea. It is a moody painting that is surrounded or “contained” by a deeply saturated blue border. This vibrant blue color shifts and shimmers only being relieved by strokes of white resembling light or clouds. “Only through that medium [encaustic] can you create that transparency,” says Carreño. Deep Blue reminds one of the intensity of color seen in the works of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clifford Still.

Carreño admits that some of his latest work is much more abstract. In Deep Blue he seems to be traveling in the direction of pure abstraction.

In other earlier mixed media works, such as We Are the Earth, mixed media on paper, 60 X 40 inches, 2004; Halfway Open, mixed media on paper, 60 X 40 inches, 2005; Blue Passages, mixed media on paper, 60 X 40 inches, 2006 the artist sometimes adds sand polymer acrylics to build up his surfaces. “It’s linked a little to a fresco technique. I am able to use sand in the background and to create a very airy surface or rough surface.”

This compositional technique draws on the theory that Hans Hofmann proposed in his teachings. There is a “push and pull” of color that creates dynamic tension.

Carreño is a prolific artist; with gestural images seemingly spilling from cultural reminiscences, past experiences and fleeting memories.

Intuitively, we sense the narrative content of his paintings. One is drawn into the work without quite knowing the reason for the magnetism it possesses.

There is freshness and spontaneity in the application of the paint.

Sometimes, quasi-linear forms dance, hover, and cavort in a rainbow of sensuous colors. He alludes to clouds, white sand, foliage, flowers, architecture and the luminous glow of sunlight in the Caribbean—all awakening our five senses.

Carreño declares that the colors of his paintings have to do with the Caribbean atmosphere.

“The sun is so strong, [that] you can’t get away from it!” Many of his paintings contain yellow hues that reflect the intensity of that Caribbean sun. Perhaps, like his predecessors, the surrealists, Carreño looks for a higher reality in his paintings. It is a reality that tests our subconscious.