THE FIGURATIVE SYMBOLS OF HIS MEMORY
Manuel Lopez Oliva
Cuban painter and art critic.
They say that Gilberto Frómeta entered the National School of Art, in 1962, riding on horse. The intricate vegetation atmosphere of that place for artistic teaching at the Cubanacán urbanization in Havana was suitable for this horse rider’s adventures. He had been such since he was a child. I heard this from promotion partners about three years later, when I entered the School with similar purposes of studying painting.
When I was devoted to the critic's professional task I published a titled article: "Frómeta, in a galloping rush". If the reason of the text was the painting of ponies and steeds, exhibited in 1984, in the same time, it was a metaphoric vision of the personality that characterized him, appreciated since we met in the bricks labyrinth that the Cuban architect, Ricardo Porro, designed as School for plastic arts, -part of the National School of Art- in the old golf field of the most exclusive Havanan club, for the formation of new type of artists, in the years 1960th.
Gilberto -then?- Was always in a rush. He worked and studied this way, he moved among the arched classrooms, toward the old residences of the millionaires, where we lived in those days, or to the restaurant of the ancient Havana Country Club, transformed in the school’s dining room. It surprised almost all of us that the " tornado " who laughed to laughter and produced such strength, was able to carry out precise, delicate and fine drawings, besides compositions in color that revealed his assimilation of the western vanguards of the XX century, his aesthetic and emotional proximity with Cuban painters as Carlos EnrÃquez and Eduardo Abela, also as Servando Cabrera Moreno, his professor.
Perhaps from that formative time come to him some of the features that would identify him: laboriousness, speed in the execution, growing sensibility and a sort of balance in pendulum between the temperamental nature and the thinking being. If the plastic variations deployed by Frometa are observed from then to these moments, it will be clear that, in some way, is manifested such psychological indicators, the same ones that he used to maintain friendships, to obtain the recognition of their teachers. When Jorge Rigol or Fayad JamÃs, Antonia Eiriz or Adigio BenÃtez and the some times a little acid, Francisco Espinoza Dueñas, talked about him, appreciated him with satisfaction as a good student.
Frometa was part of a group, the founder group of that school, composed in its majority by youngsters, coming from the field or provinces which, not in all cases had the enough preparation to assume the complexes study programs. For this, in the practice, a true renovation of the conceptions in learning plastic arts took place in the country. Among such experimentation the first promotions are graduated. In this group there were some students, as him, that assumed the artistic challenge without definitive oppositions with the graphic or educational work, while others ended up being restoring or outstanding professors.
Afterward I find Frometa in the beginnings of the discussed 70s´ decade. We coincide as young painters in group exhibitions and national Salons that were being created and prospering in those years. As he worked as editorial designer -the art commercialization almost paralyzed, until 1979 the Cuban Fund of Cultural Benefits was created-, he had to walk with the characteristic means of that occupation. He formatted, clipped pictures, composition of pages, half tones... at last these would be integrated to his creative imagination, until becoming visual bases of a modality that inaugurated his artistic renown. This moment was called by Juan Marinello, The Truth Hope Generation."
The neatness in the use of the utensils and corresponding resources, demonstrated as student, got rich with the indispensable rigor in editorial designer's work and occasionally advertising works. In the same manner, the observation and the empiric study of the visions created by artists of different latitudes and times, prepared his eyesight to see, the areas where they are adjacent and where the graphic thing with the pictorial image are mixed, what he needed to show, to create.
In this permanent track his concern for the mattiery, the order of the image, even when free impulses or the qualities of the matter mark the expression. Made possible for him to acquire the technical domain demanded by the two fields where he branches his work: the engraving and the painting. As engraver he would begin procedures like the drypoint and the mezzotint. As a painter he would travel through dissimilar solutions, from the combination of plane and figure, up to dynamic interlaced design of chromatic masses with abstract appearance.
Frometa has been -is- a "process" of singular “communicating veins". His drawings, paintings, engravings and designs have fed mutually. With them gathered, partially transformed ones in others, this artist has moved over the properties of neofiguratives, over the representation and the exprecionists atmospheres, over a certain constructive classicism and over what has been his fullest period: the metaphor of stains, frottage, informalism and diverse environmental allusions.
To the influence received by the painter through his doing in engraving from whose repertoire of means assumed its best possibilities -for example, textures and ways of extending the pigment by means of plastic spatulas- experiences and assimilated resources from another occupation would be added: the masonry. The scratched dressing of the walls, the peculiar forms that take place in the stones or other surfaces, among different derived impressions of this work, are very significant, as much as when he learns to use the mason's trowel to apply the pigments, that together with the steel point and the crayon places him in a Cuban variant, sensuous and communicative way of matter painting. It is an expression resource as valid as any other one, but in the hands of a genuine maker of beauty, takes out from light the vigor and the expansible of the personality that was announced in the classrooms of the National Art School.
Again Frometa has arrived to us on horseback. A series of wooden merry-go-rounds, of games and carrousels, invaded the big formats of his paintings. There they are, again, the memories of the childhood, always the sensibility, the concerning photography, the search in color relations, movement and a fantasy that determines the change in the route typical of his recent language. And, in another way, also appear the plastic inclinations of his principle: an overflowing will of form and a lyricism implicit in the figurative symbols of his memory
