CREATION OVER OBLIVION / RUDY COTTON
Javier Payeras
*Every now and then I walk backwards:
it is my way of remembering.
If I were to walk only forward,
I could tell you
what forgetting is like.*
—Humberto Ak’abal
We carry so much past ahead of us, because at some point we made the mistake of crossing while looking for shortcuts. We arrived at a vacant plot at the end of a ravine; the path now lies above us, and our task is to retrace our steps in order to recover lost time.
“The Creation of Forms” is a return composed of sixteen canvases and ten works on paper—a turning point in the work of Rudy Cotton, one that echoes the silent anthology found in the corridors and walls of the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno “Carlos Mérida.” This body of work is a kind of numismatics by an artist who became a voluntary captive of the space that held (and perhaps still holds) the concrete evidence of the existence of poetry in Guatemala: the creation of forms, that parallel chronicle to the convulsive history of this small Central American country—its dream, its transgression, its resilience, and its Spirit.
There is no materialism in any artwork that truly matters; invention is always both silent and dazzling.
The convergence between Rudy Cotton’s current pictorial work and the immediate reference to the inventive, geometric—sometimes whimsical—language of Carlos Mérida is more than evident. Both the themes accompanying the creations of the Popol Vuh and the borders of pure color that gradually fade, like fine dust carried off by the wind, are forms slowly acquiring the life that emerges from the conversation of certain gods—according to those who dreamed the poem before we awoke.
We live in a time when destruction has accelerated; whatever we read speaks of the latest thing destroyed in the world. Wars exterminate peoples, and mass media exterminates the reputation of talent. To paint with admirable technical dedication is to save art from the Fahrenheit 451 in which not only books burn—everything that signifies creation burns too: the attempt to hold on to life on the banks of an unrelenting river.
Populist mediocrity has turned everything into a refuge for shop-window victimhood, well subsidized by the hypocrisy of empires. Seeing this work as a whole, I think instead of the anonymous and silent passion within the artist’s studio—the passion that polishes every color, every form, until the ghost of doubt is extinguished. I think of the duration of what remains, of conversation, of the footnote as an unfinished story. Painting merely paused, only to return walking upon its own footprints.
Cerrito del Carmen, May 26, 2024