Rodolfo Abularach
(Guatemala, 1933)
He studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Guatemala City from 1954 to 1957. In 1959, Rodolfo left for New York, where he would produce the most significant work of his career. He studied at the Arts Students League and the Graphic Art Center.
Abularach does not aim to thematize representation in its symbolic dimension; instead, his work conveys a message that is both spiritual and natural. He uses figurative and surrealist approaches to revitalize traditional Latin American themes.
Rodolfo expresses himself through the action of the line and its interweaving—sometimes complicating itself along the way, other times clarifying. Within this linear world, he has developed several periods, among which the following stand out: Cristos, abstracts, bullfighting works, Ojos, angels, and volcanoes.
His work is included in various public and private collections, including the Museum of History and Fine Arts of Guatemala; the Directorate of Fine Arts of San Salvador, El Salvador; the National Art Gallery, La Paz, Bolivia; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, São Paulo, Brazil; the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica, Madrid, Spain; the Museum of Art and History, Geneva, Switzerland; the Central University of Venezuela; Museo La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia; Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan, Puerto Rico; the Leticia Guerrero Collection, Banco de Quito, Ecuador; Bank of America, Managua, Nicaragua; the National Museum of Warsaw, Poland; Museum of Art, Baghdad, Iraq; Homenaje al Premio Nobel, Borjeson Gallery, Malmö, Sweden; and the Royal Museum of Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; among others.
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El Imparcial, 1966
**In an Enlightened New York:
RODOLFO ABULARACH, THE PAINTER OF THE BLACK LINE**
The seasons leave over New York a darkened patina that gleams at night. Walls peel away and new forms stretch into the air. A macabre renaissance of cement unfolds through streets where buildings meet above, sketching the abstract outline of a strange, disconcerting city.
Below, the corners fill and the human river merges, loses itself, only to regroup further on. Underground, the paths split into subway lines—electric serpents devouring miles of darkness. The avenues choke; faint noises escape; an endless confusion in a man-made bay.
Everything hidden becomes more alluring in the enlightened city. Shadows, walls, faces, light. The concealed reality of the modern painter is felt at every step. Not in museums and galleries—on the street. A metaphysics of a city in motion, stilled in four temporal points. An intellectual spirit peering through the cracks of the contemporary soul. New York is fertile ground for the impassioned sensations of a strange creator. What is found in places like this leaves its imprint on memory. And memory is the camera of our era; the era is the artist’s circus.
In this spectacle lives and works a Guatemalan painter, for several years now. On West 14th Street lies the studio of Rodolfo Abularach, painter of a reality transfigured into black lines. A master draftsman in chiaroscuro. A scratch of the pen on paper. Depth of ink slowly spreading across the white surface. Abularach transfers into drawing all the darkness of a luminous feeling that stands out in the enlightened city. New York becomes the backdrop for the artist’s indirect dialogue, reborn with each stroke through the mysterious vault of its atmosphere.
There are large cities that suffocate, yet the struggle continues afloat. To live in New York is to fight hard. The artist devours and is devoured, falters only to feel exact again. Days stretch through museums, and the painter’s voice hides in studios. Night awakens full of lights, and the creative monologue returns in the insomnia of intellectual gatherings. Anguish and joy speak through the restless voice of artistic labor. Abularach drinks the mystery of those days, leaning over the large paper of his forms. His art carries much of the New York experience, blossoming in the memory of his homeland. His drawing-paintings belong to the sun and the moon; tiny organisms enlarged in the microscope of a cosmic vision. The circle—the periphery of life—appears throughout his work, floating in the delicate fabric of lines.
To reach such a state of formal purification, Abularach has shed the skin of his anxieties little by little, offering us a world of silent associations. A stillness, a muffled deafness in his distant introspection. The philosophy of his work is neither mystical nor violent; it is a wheel touching extremes yet always turning. Calm reigns at the beginning of light. No longer the technical expressionism of his bullfighting drawings, youthful formalism of an immature talent. No longer the mythified characters of his 1959 exhibition at the National School of Fine Arts, where Ossaye, Martínez, and Mérida’s blackouts came together. No longer El baile de los Venados. It is the essence of movement in hushed tones that appears in his exhibition at the Pan-American Union in Washington two years later. The pure drawing with pictorial quality from which the stark forms of his current work emerge. The material principle of the formal instrument now fully revealed. It is the Head of Ixtab turned into sun, made universal.
Abularach’s trajectory reached a culminating point with his exhibition at the David Herbert Gallery in New York in 1961. He finds light in shadows and indigo in the darkness of the skies. It is the encounter with de Chirico’s reality: “the phantasmagoric, metaphysical aspect that only very special individuals can observe in moments of clairvoyance and abstraction.” A poetic ecstasy of objects and of what their forms conceal. A mysterious symbolism of space without time or sound. A kind of regenerated mysticism. The illusion of a white sheet and a pen—the only material elements of his aesthetic labor.
Without forgetting his national childhood and its primitive character, Abularach weaves new forms, indirect products of his primordial reality, in a cosmogonic field of penetrating experiences. His drawings are radiographs of the city and of memory. Creative meditation has no limits in this meticulous field of his pen work. Lately, many pieces display subtle earth tones and yellows, violet hues glowing amid the morning of fine lines that gather to form black “figures” in the air. His meticulous technique, free of violent contrasts, holds a macabre, blinding delicacy—an acrobatic play of ink renewed with each stroke.
The vision of modern art has many perspectives. All arise from a natural development marked by history; in each era the scientist and the artist take their step. Our current reality multiplies constantly. What exists today may or may not exist tomorrow—yet we move. The Earth’s axis is a point in the universe, spinning among other axes now beginning to be felt. Scientific truth is sought in the stars; light is lost and found with each turn. Atomic propulsion and disintegration—nightmare and magic. And at its side, the progressive world of art seeks and finds realities in the solitary cathedrals of the spirit. Aesthetic creation suffers and delights across all sources: barbaric and chaotic, mobile and still. Everywhere, new conceptions emerge, and each person interprets their passage. Distant from torment and tearing, Abularach constrains thought within the modest meditation of a methodical religiosity. Existential suffering and extreme parody are not foreign to him. His seemingly abstract drawing never loses its organic linkage; the symbols he employs are highly figurative. A morphology of peace in the shadows: Trapped Light, Three Luminous Forms, Silence, First Light, Interrupted Time—titles from his work. Always the struggle of light against silence. The absolute questioning of a vital, primordial mystery. A formal resolution of penumbra wrought from a thousand black lines weaving existence. Not the desire to nationalize a geographic stance—his birthplace. Not a search for fashion or for seeming modern. Nor a temporary whim. Rather, a natural devotion born inwardly, achieving human sensations of cosmic depth.
The modern creator leans increasingly toward interpreting a new world of contained tranquility. The means at hand remain the same, but a revision of perspectives and concepts is underway. Literature, music, architecture, painting, sculpture—even cinema—have turned away from traditional beauty to construct the consciousness of the present. Amid worldly intoxication emerges a resistant art that, though it does not resolve the problem, lays it bare. However poetic the aesthetic expression may be, it carries a measure of historical truth.
To say modern art is dehumanized is to deny its existence. Today, more than ever, it has become eminently human. The constant search is the search for oneself. Each person has the necessary time to find what is theirs; each has the right to probe their present. Many do so passionately, with the claw of torment; others burst inwardly in the quiet repose of their soul—silent and intellectual. Kafka is a baroque of suffering, just as Fellini is anguish transformed into images. Abularach’s reality partakes in both ends, through the silence of a crushing philosophy: light and shadow.
In an enlightened, countless New York, a colossal and tense reality becomes palpable to the artist. Daily life overflows with emotions, and at any moment sensations arise. The creator is in his element, awakening from his burdens. Abularach forms himself and branches out in this field of concrete flowers. His art—silent introspection, symbols and magic, poles of black and white—goes beyond a merely reliquary principle. His force of generative light gives way to the intuitive, premature emergence of peace. A place reached with the simple purity of white paper and a pen. The artist’s minute technique becomes a meticulous web in homage to creative freedom.
Roberto Cabrera