Liliam Cuenca
Freedom Tower. Miami Dade School for the Arts. Miami
Painting, as we are taught by Asians, Romantics and Surrealists alike, is valuable insofar as it opens a door to imagination. Imagination takes the reins of empirical knowledge, replacing a reality that does not satisfy us with another of a poetic nature. Something that has the capacity to offer us a new mode of perception emerges from that encounter. As the Chinese poet Wang Yu expressed: for a wonderful effect to be produced, we must play with the brush and ink in such a way that when the former stops moving, “something different” suddenly appears. What appears unexpectedly is poetry, which always transfigures our relationship with reality. In the case of Liliam Cuenca’s painting, her approach to this discipline is based on a principle that is fundamental for her: her relationship between the visible and the invisible. Over the course of time, Liliam Cuenca has gradually incorporated in her paintings human forms, in the manner of figures that appear in the distance in a mysterious space. Those figures, however, do not deny their relation- ship with the invisible: on the contrary, they highlight it. The invisible, in this artist’s case, forces her to perform, resorting to the chromatic subtleties of her colors, an intense exploration of the possibilities of abstractionism.
In her significant book: “Zen in the fifties, interaction in art between East and West” (1), Helen Westgeest traces the influ- ences that Zen thinking applied to painting exerted upon many 20th century artists who practiced abstract art. The Sumi-e and Sho techniques used by the Zen painters constituted a teaching manual for other painters, such as Mark Tobey, Jean Degottex, Henri Michaux or Zao Wou-Ki, who in one way or another, seem to have put together a visual language for Liliam Cuenca. The guidelines are therefore found in an ancient tradition that this artist has succeeded in assimilating, with remarkable results that are entirely her own. Abstractionism has therefore served as a catalytic element for Liliam Cuenca. What do these transformations of hers consist in? In the first place, following a path dictated by her poetics, this painter has achieved a syn- thesis of figuration and non-figuration.
As I have already men- tioned, the emergence of characters in her paintings responds to an internal need to expand her expressive horizon. Those characters are there to attest to a search that drives the artist to find a way out from what may be perceived as the void into which abstraction may fall. In spite of this, in some of her paintings a simple gesture with the brush gives us the impression of being quite the opposite. That is, it reveals the unification of filled and empty in her work. By avoiding the dan- ger of falling into pure nothingness, Liliam Cuenca’s painting goes deep into the interior spaces, into those interiors that the poet Henri Michaux liked to inhabit. But they also exist as silent pauses in her work. Silence is ultimately the great answer that an artist can offer. In her case they are simple pauses, like the very brief ones we detect in Anton Von Webern’s compositions. However, we perceive in these pauses a fullness of meaning.
Liliam Cuenca has shown in her recent exhibition at the Miami Dade School for the Arts’ “Freedom Towers” that far from having reached the end of an intense trajectory, she has set out on a new path. I think that, without ceasing to be faithful to the principles that induced her to choose her style, the emergence of new elements in her paintings incorporates new queries in her work. What better way to continue a task than under an interrogation mark? That is to say, posing the challenge for other interpretations to appear while her work continues validating itself.
