CHENCO

Born in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, South America. Currently, he lives in USA.

EDUCATION

· Escuela de Bellas Artes (School of Fine Arts), Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

· Special studies in Psychology of Art and the Art of the Mental Illness, School of Medicine, Universidad de Cartagena, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

· Studies of Law and Political Science, School of Law, Universidad de Cartagena, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

· Doctor in Law and Political Science, summa cum laude , Universidad de Cartagena, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

COLLECTIONS

Chenco is in private and public collections in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Israel, Mexico, Lebanon, Paraguay, Peru, Spain, United States, Uruguay and Venezuela.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“In the hectic pace of our time, we’ve not given ourselves an opportunity

to introspect and peel off our masks, unveiling our truths and realities.

Through my work, my hope is to evoke philosophical changes, expand

creativity, and evoke the freedom to observe, embrace and accept one

other… unconditionally…”

CHENCO: ART AS A CHALLENGE

By Jorge de La Fuente, Cuban Art Critic and College Professor

Art is, among other possibilities, a permanent imbalance between rationality and intuition - or, better yet, an always renewed and open attempt to reconcile the immediate emotional impulses with the rules imposed by tradition, society, and culture. In the specific case of Colombian Simón Mariano Gómez Ruiz, universally known as “Chenco,” this contradictory tension is part of the structure of his professional training. On the one hand, his education: he graduated Suma Cum Laude with a doctoral degree in Law and Political Sciences from the University of Cartagena, Colombia; and, on the other, his irrepressible artistic calling moved him to register for incomplete courses in painting at the School of Fine Arts in that same city, together with forays in the fields of the Psychology of Art and of Mental Illness. I suppose that a great deal of the irony, self-confidence, of his demystifying attitude, of his breaking-off from conventions and of his constant provocation of mainstream values may be the result of an unresolved conflict within the artist’s inner world, between the rigor imposed by the regulations of the Law and the arbitrary quality that characterizes artistic creation. Perhaps the only breakeven point unifying both vocations - Art and Law - may be Chenco’s enhanced sensibility toward social issues and, in general, toward the unbearable lightness of being.

The role of intuition in Chenco’s work has been stressed as one of his permanent traits throughout his artistic life. In this respect, writer and critic Eduardo Márceles Daconte wrote that: “His work irradiates a refreshing energy that emanates from these arbitrary drawings, the result of an attitude willing to follow the urges of intuition or the wild abandon of the unconscious.” However, this inclination to give absolute freedom to the immediacy of intuition is usually based on specific personal experiences, on fictional or historical tales, on current news or on personal observations regarding everyday life that work as springs from which the complex structure of the work is built. We are not dealing with works with literary ambitions or with graphic chronicles of an era; they are instead systematic glimmers from the imagination in the face of a complex reality demanding new forms of expression that combine a personal interpretation with aesthetic enjoyment. That was precisely what I wrote a couple of years ago in an article about Chenco’s psychological inquiries: “... [his work] is a free and easy way of distorting the figure, line and color in order to create a disturbing, albeit gratifying, visual impact.”

The manifestation of social issues in Chenco’s work, such as stress, consumerism, conformity, or marginality, which punctuate a great deal of the body of his work during the 1990s, is giving way to - or coexisting with - a mellowed-out, less dramatic and even mystic search for things human. Moreover, this trait is likewise projected into shapes, which become simpler and less “baroque.” The use of light pastel colors and of a simpler composition tells us about the presence of a new, more quiet spirituality in Chenco’s work, even though his characteristic irony has been preserved. In this connection, art critic and professor Carol Damian pointed out that: “Chenco has invented a symbolic language that is simultaneously unsettling and ingenious due to the irony of its contents and the universality of its perceptions.”

In his recent series of paintings, Chenco stresses the sense of the theatrical in his pieces. Shapes and the pictorial space itself turn up framed by decorative outlines - insects, fish, dots of color, flowers, filigrees, or fabric that simulates lace - which suggest a thematic concentration on the mise en scène . Perhaps this trait strengthens the irony and the detachment with which the artist faces his artistic themes as well as his own life: The scene itself is artificial and ephemeral in the face of a factual reality and of the continuous, irreversible chain of time. In theses cases, performance appears as a conventional act of staging that underlines the intention to offer the audience the interpretation of an experience beyond the mere description of a fact.

The series on Judeo-Christian themes is another example of his personal interpretation of some Biblical passages and of an iconographic tradition well established in art history. Even though the figure of the Christ is shown with his genitals in several of the scenes of the Crucifixion, this does not imply a grotesque desecration of His image. It simply is a way of humanizing the Son of God, a way of bringing Him closer to us, of depicting Him in our own image. Moreover, that proximity to the Divine can be observed as well in his iconography of angels with indigenous features. It is a question of a style that exploits to the hilt the effect of naïveté and innocence handed down to us by naïve art, popular traditions, children’s drawings, and some forms of Expressionism. It is the same impression I get from the erotic representations in Chenco’s paintings. In his Kama Sutra series and in his other treatment of the erotic, the artist places us on a plane of perception far removed from the grotesque and from common pornography. His approach to sex, to the sexual act itself, is based on an aloof presentation of bodies intertwining in whimsically sketched shapes that have been created with the use of sharp lines, flat colors and the total absence of depth, which make them devoid of the kind of sensuality that would elicit a more or less realistic representation. Narrowly defined, they are erotic scenes taken on as part of a sociocultural reality and not as a gratuitous stimulation for the libido.

Chenco’s use of texts in his pieces goes further beyond assigning a title to his paintings. Words written on any space of the piece’s frame oftentimes complement its meaning, or else it is an invitation for interpretations that the image would like to elicit from the viewer or that, in fact, elicits from the artist, once it is complete. This is so because, in his creative work, Chenco does not start out with a sketch or a preconceived idea. The theme takes shape while he is applying the acrylic to the wood; it is a procedure similar to the automatic writing used by Surrealists, in which the ideas and images flow by free association and, while they reveal themselves, they create a body of meanings that the author had not been consciously aware of. There is a playful, spontaneous element to his modus operandi, which well agrees with the artist’s personality already trained in the demystification of established habits, as well as in the creative transgression of ideological and artistic conventions.

The semantic independence, which sometimes informs the texts in his pieces, has led Chenco in a most natural way to the creation of books in which the text reaches great autonomy with regard to the image. While reviewing in his studio the books he has made in recent years, Chenco surprised me not only by the relevance of his metaphysical preoccupations, but, also, by the great number of highly original images that I found in their pages. To articulate it somehow, in each of his books there is a first-rate exhibition in the making. Those are luxuries that a soul endowed with a superabundance of experiences and plastic interests, and obsessed with working beyond any limits, can indulge in.

Like a good native son of the Caribbean basin, Chenco has a very good sense of rhythm and of merrymaking, and like his fellow West Indians, he has been endowed with a quality that makes us different from the rest: Nothing astonishes us - in other words, we perceive that which is transcendent as something ordinary. Whether it is anxiety he wants to depict, he would not do it employing the dramatic, melancholy style Munch used in “The Scream,” but, rather, as a colored uncertainty, as an astonishment or surprise expressed with compassion and humor. Not even death manages to get away from his ironic gaze, to the extent that his skeleton already lies in a small, wooden, black sarcophagus that has become his latest craftwork divertimento: He has not only laid out his symbolic death, but, furthermore, he has given away this anticipation of death, with their respective skeletons, as a gift to family members and friends.

Likewise, Chenco’s work is an expression of the intermingling of cultures found in the Caribbean; he thinks of art as a sort of a stylistic cannibalism that does not acknowledge borderlines: From historical styles, such as Expressionism or Cubism, to Medieval and Byzantine iconographic traditions, to Pop Art, the comics, and commercial posters. All these resources are taken on as tools for the plastic resolution of Chenco’s main challenge: To contribute to making us see the world in a more unprejudiced, questioning way, beyond conventions and clichés. All this is part of the magic that Chenco has given us for more than fifty years: An unclassifiable and, yet, always revealing art.