Niebla (1965) by Carlos Raquel RiveraInstituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña
Niebla is a non-traditional landscape that shows us elements of fantasy in its flora and hints of mystery.
Some of the flora depicted in this work display anthropomorphic features...
...like hands and faces...
...suggesting the presence of an entity (Or various entities?) that..
...mixed with the symbolism evoked by the mist, raise more questions than answers
The painting narrates parallel stories that are hidden in plain sight.
A more careful look reveals dancing lovers and chatty neighbors.
Magical realism is a movement that had its beginnings in Latin America in the 1930’s. Generally, this term is associated with literature, as great figures such as Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier and Isabel Allende cultivated this expressive form and elevated it to unsuspected levels. They and other great writers of the Latin American pantheon gave us works full of a realistic vision of the mundane, in which mysterious, magical and supernatural elements flourish.
This manifestation is also present in pictorial works of this historical moment, for example, in Niebla by Carlos Raquel Rivera from Yauco, Puerto Rico. This artwork, painted between 1961 and 1965, presents us with a night landscape, dramatic and full of details that invite exploration.
In the atmosphere of poverty and marginalization of a neighborhood full of wooden houses, multiple stories are juxtaposed. Making use of the proverb and its popular wisdom: that small town becomes a big hell, full of the gossip of those who look out of its windows, either to be silent witnesses of the events or to comment on reality collectively. You "see the speck in someone else's eye" when inside these houses you experience events equal to or more scandalous than those outside.
In this large composition, where the use of miniature plays an important role, everything is ambiguous and in contrast. The great landscape hides; among other things, some fugitive lovers/dancers and the presumed jilted man who pursues them with a knife in his hand. Similarly, in the same space where the viewer enjoys living vegetation with all imaginable shades of green, death is also manifested with a hidden corpse, but in plain sight.
The timing is not clear. We do not know which events happened before and which happened after. The present, the past and the future seem to be narrated at the same time, everything camouflaged by the thick veil of mist.
