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In his extraordinary “Notebooks,” Leonardo da Vinci made the following observation: Hands and arms must make evident as much as possible with each gesture the intention of the spirit that moves them, as it is through them in each of their movements that anyone who possesses artistic sense shall follow the intention of the mind. Let us now ponder on a text about painting written by the 18th Century Taoist philosopher Shen Tsung-Ch’ien: As one readies oneself to use ink on paper, one must sense in the wrist a force similar to the universe creating life. It pours out of us freely, without obstruction or deliberation. We put a dot here, a line there, and the object gains form; everything can be put down on paper. These two premises, the Renaissance master’s and the Taoist wise man’s, seem to serve as the foundation for the gesturalism that was all the rage during the 1940s and 1960s in US and French painting, and the automatism that served as the point of departure thereto. Taking these premises as a starting point, we can observe how both of them converge in Silvio Gayton’s paintings and drawings. His black and white drawings, in particular, serve him as the parting point for creating more complex paintings, where color plays a predominant role.
In the development of contemporary painting, which seemed to become polarized between figurative and abstract tendencies, there began to appear a synthesis that cubism had foreshadowed. As time passed, this synthesis was capable of setting other guidelines that ultimately merged with the so-called French abstract expressionists and gestualists, joined by the CoBra group of painters. Although this synthesis did not quite fully resolve the optical differences of reality that abstractionism had proposed, it at least opened the path for other solutions that undoubtedly turned out to be an auspicious occasion in the evolution of painting. When other plastic and anti-plastic art movements (which underlined the difference between retinal painting, as described by Duchamp, and conceptualism) began to burst into avant-garde art, many of the torchbearers of a style of painting that insisted on continuing to explore other routes that seemed to have been surmounted, were left behind. Even though the dead-end road of minimalism or the infinite mental prancing of conceptualism continue to persist in their efforts, they still have not been able to offer a satisfactory counterpart to the simple act of picking up a brush and painting. Hence, the modernity entailed in Leonardo’s and the Taoist philosopher’s texts.
Silvio Gayton has progressed along a route that makes him see reality in successive prisms: at times, we perceive in his paintings and drawings the stroke that pours out of us freely, without obstruction or deliberation, making evident as much as possible with each gesture the intention of the spirit that moves him. In his paintings, the strokes are structured around colors and forms that appear as totems, dolmens, fetishes or human figures. We discern in these figures traces ingrained in his imagination by the likes of a Lam, a Szyslo or a Tamayo, each of them keepers of a gaze that unveils the wonder of the American temperament. The color inherited from the fauves, in turn inherited by painters as those of the CoBra group, has served him to express himself within a specifically West Indian framework. This does not mean that Silvio Gayton’s painting falls into stale ethnic interpretations, so widely favored by contemporary critics. But it is undeniable that the expressive force of our continent generates for him an inexhaustible gushing fountain of poetic flow.
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On the other hand, in his paintings there are two other variants: a first one that leans towards a pure abstraction which exposes the experiments by painters who follow this tendency. The second one, human figures, portraits or nudes, which are related, because of the impact of their artistic force, with many of the painters that lean towards that tendency. From a fauvist Matisse to Emil Nolde or Jawlensky, the human figure was the object of an explosion of colors that transformed it into a radiant expressionist scene. Silvio Gayton’s human figures follow that same route, distancing him from realistic representations of portraiture to create countenances of exuberant colors.
His black and white drawings result from gestures and movements that compel the painter to actively participate in their production, in the same manner as Pollock during the last stage of his career. Therein he fulfills, undoubtedly, one of the aesthetic principles of Taoist art: saying without saying. In other words, the gesture fulfills a role very much in line with the silence that Zen masters of old preferred to give as an answer, thus connecting his drawings to an Oriental tradition that also originated from the pure act of “displaying the power of a stroke of the brush with proper control in the movement,” as proclaimed by one of the “six essential laws and six qualities” of the art of painting embodied in the Oriental aesthetic. Although Silvio Gayton is not a Buddhist, he prefers to allow inspiration to emerge on its own through the simple gesture of surrendering to the vital movement of drawing. Automatism plays an essential role here. Automatism as understood by the surrealists was, first and foremost, a poetic force before becoming an instrument of artistic creation. In fact, some painters who engaged in it were poets, as was the case with Henri Michaux. Others, like Wols or André Masson, were close to surrealism. The drawing’s lines and blotches create their own convulsive reality, and in this sense Silvio Gayton has been able to communicate a force that never quite destroys the image. Thus, at the center of his painter’s gaze, reality never ceases to appear, as if challenging him to a duel with abstraction. The outcome of this duel is the synthesis to which I made reference at the beginning of this critique. The importance of this synthesis, in my opinion, lies in the fact that it captures the teachings of cubism, providing structure to the composition in order to create a solid foundation.
Art as the object of self-satisfaction, as stated by Wilhelm Worringer , accomplishes its mission in the work of Silvio Gayton. It is essentially a transposition of images that playfully extend from the abstract to the representative. The reward of this playfulness lies in the pure enjoyment of its execution. And so it is with art. This is why we feel, when confronting the body of work of this painter, that behind the processes of his technique, his reward lies in the fact that he makes us participants of an art that transcends the limits imposed by trends. And all thanks to a simple and profound creativity.
1.- Leonardo da Vinci: “Cuadernos de notas,” M.E. Editores, Madrid, 1993, translated by José Luis Velaz, page 77.
2.- Luis Racionero: “Textos de estética taoísta.” Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1999, pages 126-127.
3.- Ibid, page 165.
4.- Wilhelm Worringer: “Abstraction and Empathy,” Ivan R. Dee, Inc., publisher, 1997, translated from the German by Michael Bullock, page 28.
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