Work of Gonzalo Borges

In the work of Gonzalo Borges the pictorial and spiritual matter burns

This is a master who, over more than six decades, has provided and incorporated a wide visual repertoire into his work.

The personality of the artist is the representation of his work. This is expressed in the language that he adopts, in the way of narrating life, of extracting the beauty of nature and in the personal pleasure that he feels when modulating emotions and experiences.

We are talking, as a colloquium, about the personality of the consecrated Cuban master Gonzalo Borges, an intelligent and profound artist in his pictorial endeavors; accurate when painting, lucid and magnificent when it comes to immortalizing beauty in his work.

Gonzalo Borges is an artist of internationally recognized fame for his persistent mythology, through which he recreates a fascinating spiritual world where beauty ratifies his powerful reflective capacity and his iconographic lexicon. This is a master who, over more than six decades, has provided and incorporated a wide visual repertoire into his work.

In his plastic creations the pictorial and spiritual matter burns, and the maestro Gonzalo Borges always places himself at the center of this from the perspective of an ancestral morphology. If complex, they represent a prolific picture of prophetic visions; If his anthological symbols are complex, revealing emblematic and emphatic myths that point to the origin of the magical-religious culture of the Caribbean, in the same way he deploys in his pictorial compositions imaginary flights that allow him to capture nature from a fresh plastic language, which which has accredited him over more than six decades as an artist capable of creating paintings and drawings with the most diverse themes.

His work is anthropological, historiographic, autobiographical, ontological and psychosocial and, particularly, fantastic and surprising for its visual conception full of dreamlike when it addresses the style of abstract-surrealism, where the beauty and magic of dreams stands out, a phenomenon that everyone lights implies a compositional elaboration process of multiple interpretations. Apparently simple creations, but with a depth greatly enriched by calligraphy and form techniques that formulate the most fertile imagination.

It could be said that Gonzalo Borges paints the magical and wonderful world that Alejo Carpentier talks about. However, in Borges, the universe of his work is expressed through symbolic lyricism and in a very personal way by having the privilege of physically touching the matter in which all kinds of artistic manifestation crystallizes. Let's say that the richness of his imagination also leads him to transform the simple into complex, and the complex into a deepening of the paradigmatic. He is an artist who overflows with emotions; He goes beyond the architecture of painting and graphics as he has multiple facets. In each painting or drawing he discovers a new form of expression, thereby demonstrating a peculiar and unprecedented aesthetic fidelity.

For example, in his paintings, each layer of color that he applies contains a very spontaneous and particular approach and an experience of the technique that identifies him as one of the most innovative painters of recent decades and, from that point of view, his work It provides the viewer with vertigo when visualizing its heterogeneity where it establishes an order of ideas, symbols, images and the range of converging colors.
In the drawing, the master Gonzalo Borges, in addition to using ink, halftone, shadows and imaginative and architectural graphics, achieves the result of an inexhaustible light that does not leave any empty space in the composition due to the classification he achieves. the lines that move from end to end without distorting the density of the atmosphere or surface. Therefore, the peculiarity of his iconography leads to an imaginary depth.

His voluminous and rich work has its own canon and a candid attitude that, as a mark, places the maestro Gonzalo Borges in the line of artists who have turned archeology, myths, customs and legends into a historical map, a culture that unites the Caribbean countries in the same purpose: identity; a realistic and humanist art; new definitions in relation to the Western tradition; in convergence where the destiny of liberation is the same as a result of the artist's ethics and the way of imagining a better world together. In the front row of this universality of purposes, commitments and projects is Gonzalo Borges.

This is so, because the teacher Gonzalo Borges has traveled all the paths of art and his attitude towards it is to learn and unlearn the simultaneous perception that his aesthetic commitment produces; This has led him to constantly renew himself and create a language of tensions; to compose and decompose intermediate forms that communicate concepts

wonderful moments that reveal, in an imperative and mysterious way, the simplicity of its colors. Colors that are the lungs of his paintings through which his symbols and the meticulous strokes and brushstrokes that he applies in his pictorial creations breathe.

In these plastic creations nothing is left to chance; On the contrary, the action that he aesthetically develops contains arguments that exemplify his great capacity to create. In the cognitive, in the telluric and in the mystical, he postulates an imprint that makes him the special case of being one of the most important painters in Latin America and the Caribbean today. For this reason, in the footsteps of Wifredo Lam, René Portacarrero, Amelia Peláez, Cundo Bermúdez, José Bedia, Carmen Herrera, Tomás Sánchez, Roberto Fabelo, Mijares and Vicente Dopico Lerner, among others, Gonzalo Borges is evident as one of the greats masters of Cuban painting and continuator of a space-time that allows him to elevate to the highest levels “the myths and legends” that allude to the social and human meanings of an anthropological identity.

And they remind us, as an anthropological identity, of the origin of the route of the African slaves who established their archetypal emancipation as culture, language, drama, challenge, religion, exclamation in the face of the exploitation and pain received from the English, French and Spanish, and whose seat from then on has an impact on the Caribbean, privileging its culture and destiny, which grows and is reproduced in the work of Gonzalo Borges. Both Cuban critics and critics from the United States, including Miami, the Dominican Republic and other Latin American countries, are correct in stating that his work represents emotional, aesthetic and imaginative achievements that reveal its authenticity and autonomous tone.