It was Saturday when Joel Núñez invited me to visit Codified Reality, an exhibition that brought together a handful of works where abstraction was the gravitational center. They were clean works, with deep lines that pierced the canvas, channels that defined the order of reality; visual haikus, where chromatic synthesis generates a coded landscape, in which symbolic reminiscences evoke a painting disintegrated in time. These were works calibrated in their composition, unlike certain types of abstraction that, overloaded with layers upon layers and aggressive textures, end up absorbing a notion of the residual as waste.
The use of color—like Mark Rothko—in these works has been intentionally logical. In planes delimited as layers of a body, the organization of color refers to tones that, although primary, acquire the texture of oxidation, as when, in blood rites, the garment absorbs the ochre tone. The color in Joel Núñez’s work is significant for its cave-like evocation, but above all, it is syncretic. The planes of reality are transgressed by small alliterations—Cortazar would say Cronopios—that invade his canvases and refer to other works. They are small intervals, filigrees of light, dissipative structures that break the silence that the observer has reached.
Codified Reality is a castle of shadows, the prelude to an interstice where a cornered subject diagrams—eroding a canvas—a disintegrated reality with the vain hope of finding a trace of light, even if it is ephemeral. Codified Reality is an exercise in reducing the tracing of the line, a search for elements, the difficult simplicity of a gesture without linguistic predisposition. Not all abstraction produced today can unravel the nature of simplicity. The Taoists had this as their goal through silence.
To get here, Joel Núñez has distilled an exasperating visuality, a tormenting fiction that comes to life on his canvases. With ups and downs, the painting that precedes Codified Reality creates a balance in which an identity is taking shape. Deeply influenced by new media, Joel Núñez creates a symbiosis where the grotesque prevails as visuality.
They are the ghosts of reason that precede understanding, they are Matthew Barney’s hybrids. Joel Núñez has pierced the space of the dreamlike that is hidden in the blank canvas. His figurative work, overflowing with creatures, as well as his abstract work, segregates an identity like the torment of the calligrapher.
How can we capture in the image that the gesture prefigures, its significance in the body of the canvas?
Joel Núñez’s figurative work abounds with visual spasms, a sordid naivety, a diagram of a nightmare. They are creatures that inhabit a body transacted by terror. I wonder if generations like ours harbor disturbing feelings, tribulations that end up tormenting the conscience and rendering the body dysfunctional. The visuality that Joel Núñez has offered us for so many years is not gratuitous. His sense of expressionism encompasses everything. Each subject harbors a miserable side, something that disfigures them and makes them sinister, even in their candor; they are complicated, cartilaginous ghosts, like those knot figures that Bruno Münsterberg, Oskar’s nurse, ties with discarded strings that flood his room in the psychiatric ward. It is no small thing, the years and the damage that a dictatorship as meticulous as Cuba’s causes to a subject who, in order to be free, has had to go into exile. Even in freedom, the obsessive relationship with the past dulls any emotional connection with the present. As Regis Meyran would say, subjects who survive a totalitarian regime end up orphaned from new utopias. I would like to be optimistic, but true expressionism lies in the traumatic relationship with consciousness.
If in abstraction the powerful lines end up eroding the canvas, in his expressionist work the shock of these lines contrasts with the “simplicity” of the image. The lines end up generating a cartography of trembling, challenged by a surreal sense of existence. They are half-creatures, hybrids, amended to debris, patched up trying to cope with a normalized condition. Joel’s expressionist work is a lesson in anatomy, an expiation of fear, a drainage of guilt, an inventory of fatalities. Between sardonic and cracked smiles, a paternalistic existence passes. They are creatures of misery, laziness, despair. Joel Núñez’s expressionist work is an X-ray of an existence plagued by voids and spasms; his canvases are a flashback to a past that still haunts us.
The homeland of a writer, said Reinaldo Arenas, is the blank page, the blank canvas, and the blank score. I believe Joel Núñez has understood the meaning of that empty space in which he has to work. Moving away from the death throes of stereotypes, the very ones that have made us believe that in the dark all cats are gray, he laboriously forges his own path, as only someone who knows what they want can do, without the melancholic and cloying complacency of certain apostates of art.
Although Codified Reality is his latest work on display, I believe that curating an exhibition with the most recalcitrant and cryptic of his expressionist work would be a watershed moment in the quagmire of contemporary art. Above all, his series in Indian ink and watercolors, or the works that make up Monstruosamente tiernos [Monstrously Tender, 2003–2009], generate a visual drama that would be interesting to compare in relation to an increasingly skeptical audience overwhelmed by the fragility of false Bohemian crystal. These are works with a formidable finish, clean in their composition and mechanics, in their framing and blurring. Their visual spectrum generates an iconoclastic magnetism. They are works that either captivate you or you simply abhor; there is no room for half measures. They are creatures deeply oblique in their identity, which, like the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings, provoke an emotional cataclysm.
Joel has known how to play with those who consume his work, playing like a cat with a ball of yarn, putting them in a situation, shaking them up to break that technicolor fantasy. I appreciate this type of work that unsettles, that forces you to consume it at intervals, like sipping a good wine. I appreciate how Joel Núñez has managed to be consistent—as has Yuniel Delgado Castillo—with work that creates tension and disdain, that does not easily fit into the living room of a house but that conjures up an ontological will that certain contemporary art lacks.
Cover image: El acurrucador (Acrylic on canvas, 2006).
Inside images: The Hidden Face (Ink and watercolor on cardboard, 2013). Pequeño gran mundo (Acrylic on canvas, 2006).
