On the Recent Art of Carlos Betancourt

By Robert Farris Thompson, dean of History of Art Department, Yale University

Start with his body. A recent self-presentation involves painting his face blue and his body warm red in “Apito y Cenizas with Letter to Alberto” [plate 1]. Blue glitter and raw earth rest on his body. He considers the fingers of his left hand. The ashes of his grandmother are caught there.

Deepening a private ritual of remembrance, a painted-on ideograph with two spiral pattern emblazons his chest. The artist attributes the inspiration of this sign to the Hopi. In the iconography of Native American New Mexico and Arizona, spirals can symbolize breath, wind, and smoke. In addition, farther south, in Mexican antiquity, spiral-like scrolls, when drawn by the mouth, equal speech: a wind made of words. Signing his body with this powerful sign, the artist seems to invoke his grandmother’s protection in a way very special and secret: give us breath, give us life.

Blue glitter on his chest the artist relates to star dust or meteor debris. He is thinking of Kongo-Cuban mystic receptacles -prendas- opened in the night to absorb falling stars. He is mixing the ashes of his grandmother with glitter tinted blue, the color of heaven the color that evil can’t cross.

In another photograph, “Aracoel’s Ashes or Watching the Maize in the Altiplano” [plate 2] the camera pulls back, revealing the artist’s naked body. His grandmother’s ashes now rest in his right hand. His nakedness emphasizes the seriousness of his ritual. Betancourt arranges his hands in two gestures, one to support traces of his ancestor, the other to display his body. The tension between ritual and narcissism adds intensity to the pose.

Betancourt knows that the body is the beginning of everything. The dawn of the image very likely emerged on the frame of a woman or man. What Betancourt writes on the chest and arms are letters and messages in mirror-writing. Why would a Puerto Rican-Cuban-American be interested in writing this way? For one thing he’s aware of the role mirrors play among followers of palo, the creolized religion of Kongo in the Caribbean and Miami. Embedding mirrors in horns, as an eye to infinity, is one of the ways paleros seek vision. Horns with a mirror (vititi menso), gives eyes to their altars.

Betanocurt, however, does not copy this tradition directly. He works with a mirror in his own private way. In “Self Portrait with Letter to Aracoel” [plate 3] he covers his body with a script to be read in a mirror. Death is a negative. So, in Kongo belief, all things reverse as they pass into glory. Betancourt writes to the other world backwards, in the terms of their optic. As he does so, he brings back his grandmother’s image. In a hand richly coated with the color of passion he holds a small photograph-showing her face when she was very young and unmarried.

The body-script unfolds very handsomely. Like a rock artist in South Africa, using a curved wall to add motion and dimension to a frieze of wild elands, Betancourt takes cues from the shapes of the human figure. Words fill in pectorals like paragraphs. The curve of shoulders cause curved lines of writing to march down the back.

Script on his face takes on strange power. Somehow the letter flatten the features. We associate writing with a base that is level, with the plane of a page. So letters overmaster the nose, eyes, and eyebrows, as if a pane of pure glass, overwritten with writing, were masking or obliterating his identity. Derrida was referring to more than he knew when he talked about the ‘violence of the letter’.

The mask of letters returns in “Lily, Obatala’ y Chichecastenango” [plate 4] where the eyes of a man, ( Alberto LaTorre, Miami ), emerge in dense script. An elegant ideograph, which the artist relates to the rain, cuts down from the subject’s neck to his shoulders, truncating the lines of his body. Mirror writing here is intended as a communication to Obatala’, the Yoruba god of creativity and justice, ‘he who turns blood into children’.

We come now to an ultimate mirror: the Atlantic Ocean, a mass liquid glass that extends to the edge of our continent. Betancourt plays with this splendor. Engagement with surf leads to various works. In “Untilted (Intersection)” [plate 5] a photograph reveals the artist on his back on a beach. A wave crashes over his body. Note the slight wince, as salt and cold water slap his face. The edge of the water becomes a garment of foam.

“Daca Bagua” [plate 6] mounts a frieze of seven photographs, seven takes of his face being hit by the sea. Foam crowns his head and water pulls his hair into filaments. Theartist is passive. He lets water work him.

In “Message to Caguana” [Plate 7] a man, (Richard Blanco, Connecticut ), rests on dry sand, at the top of a beach, facing down. Small tortoise claws rest on his back. The tortoise is an attribute of Caguana, Taino goddess who created mankind. The poet’s broad back becomes a page for a prayer. Black lines of writing match the lines of his hair. The letters are mysterious. Backwards numerals - 4, 5, 6, 7 - appear. They’re mysterious too. A hard, breathing body provides, one more time, a ground for a coded communication to a spirit. Deft cropping emphasizes the arms of the poet. It’s as if he were embracing the earth. Finally wave-like strong lines of prominent writing encircle his biceps and emphasize the ridge of his shoulders.

Working with body-script, viewed on the sand of a beach, leads to an exciting development. On the night of the equinox, March 19, 2000, Betancourt signed an entire beach with an ideograph [Plate 8, 9]. Like Serpent Mound in Ohio, or Nazca lines of Peru, his earthwork is meant to be read from above.

The construction entailed some two thousand five hundred African and Taino-like patterns carved out of wood, painted gleaming black, and set on two, three and four inch stilts in the sand, creating different planes. Three hundred feet long, the earthwork ran parallel to the beach opposite 21st Street in Miami Beach. Miami art enthusiasts celebrated this work as the first major project since Christo’s “Surrounded Islands”.

The ideograph has a circular head, three bars as a chest, and legs that curl out like a tail. This was Betancourt’s “Sounds Symbols Project”. The figure, however enigmatic, is clearly celebratory. A jovial team, wearing T-shirts with the very same sign [plate 10], followed Betancourt’s specifications. They set up hundreds of miniatures sculptures in the sand within clearly marked-out areas and when they were done the ideograph was complete. Sound Symbols Project was popular. Betancourt, by request, will reward Miami with another strong beachwork, this one a figuration in color. It will have two arm-like extensions, round head, and anchor-like legs.

Malraux wrote in The Voices of Silence that art leaves us nothing but irreconcilable fragments. this is a council of defeat, postmodernist before its time. Betancourt with hard work, and openness to experience, will give us an antidote. He will reconcile the irreconcilable. How, please? Because he is willing to listen to all sides of an argument. In the many-languaged nature of his work he is arguing, like Bedia and Mendieta before him, equal potency for the Caribbean and the West.

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The Eye of the Sky is Open: The Art of Carlos Betancourt.

Robert Farris Thompson

Dean History of Art Department, Yale University

February 14, 2006

New Haven.

The Yoruba of Nigeria have an idiom for good weather: the eye of the sky is open. This is the world of Carlos Betancourt, a world ruled by color, starting with blue, like Klein, like Matisse. Betancourt thinks cosmologically, too: the dome of the sky, the surge of the sea, and the straight-lined horizon are on his mind. This puts him in parallel with ancestral cultures, like the makers of the Nazca lines, or, more to the point. Ana Mendieta’s fusion of body and landscape. This is an artist inspired by faraway epochs; sites and traditions where women and men paint on the canvas of body, looking like worlds aflame with red pigment, alive with dotted signs of kinesis and majesty.

This is the way we meet him, body cropped artfully, hands offering an object, biceps and pectorals curving with strength, skin dressed in jolts of blue and gold pigment, as if scratched by the forces of nature. [Plate l] This is his idea of a footnote, to pose at a spot near where his clearest and most constant influence, Ana Mendieta, once herself worked.

He is holding in both hands a nest that had fallen from a tree in Little Havana, not far from where Ana Mendieta had famously fashioned one of her silhouettes. With this nest he is offering an architecture of life, meant for small creatures who, like the soul of Mendieta, eventually took flight.

Betancourt’s late colleague, Keith Haring, once said “primordial styles make you new”, and proved it with spaceships circling the pyramids. Betancourt, similarly, brings into consonance visions ancient and contemporary. Like the powerful silhouettes of Kara Walker, Carlos’s work cries out for the wall, not the page. Caught in a catalogue, the sly promiscuities of Walker unduly are spotlit by linear arrangements. This slows the art down. But march them around the white walls of a gallery and aesthetics take over, putting the obscene in its place.

Similarly, Carlos loves to pose without clothes. White butt on white page accents a narcissist. But consider the mural, Worshipping of My Ancestors: five photographs of him bare-chested on a wall, body blazing lurid orange, pointing and signing in five different ways. [Plate 2] By involving his body in a procession of gestures things get serious: he’s following the path of ritual, taking us back to women and men who believed they had a responsibility for bringing back Spring with motion and gesture, for lighting up winter with candles on evergreens. The ancient Peruvians were unafraid to use whole valleys as canvas, making the famous lines of the Nazca. Betancourt lets a lagoon paint a backdrop for an ochre- marked, languorous, portrait of his body. . [Plate 3] He reclines in a corner, gazing out at the water. One hand shows his heart, the other grasps a conch shell. Photography rules: cropping is all. The resulting one-corner composition recalls, to

this art historian, a favored device of the painters of the Southern Sung.

Betancourt likes to work in series. In this way he is not so much portraying the rituals of Amerindian and Afro-Caribbean cultures, as casting them, like actors, in a

vast photo-muralized show. An example: a thicket of trees frames the profile of a naked woman. Her breast is engorged, her nipple erect, and her belly protrudes with ‘the obstetric line’, the curve of a woman come to full term. Framing thusly, as if in an improvised altar hidden the woods, he dramatizes her midriff as a vessel for children, and her nipple as a spout for their nourishment. He is playing with raw nature but the intention is love. He is saying with photographed body art what Neruda said with words: I want to do with you what Spring does with cherry trees.

In other words, he wants us to blossom, red warm and hot.. Consider a photograph of an elegant woman with blue eyes whom he’s covered with pink paint [Plate 5]

She is the canvas but the canvas stares back. In control of all this, Betancourt is not so much painting his subject, then photographing her, as filming her portrait for dramatic projection on a huge slice of gallery space that reads like a screen.

Betancourt’s oeuvre is peopled with echoes of natïve accomplishment, Taino, Lucumi, Afro-Puerto Rican, even the original Berber inhabitants of the Islas Canarias. He dreams of their festivals, brilliant and fast. From constant immersion in the arts of native peoples sometimes their power comes over his work, making us live once again in their time.

Take for instance, a well-armed earthwork, showing a row of cavities dug into earth ritualized with white pigment, Each hole is glowing, with bright fuchsia paint. Arms carefully crossed, as if to ward off a force or a problem, a reclining figure places his head within one of these cavities. This strong composition lies in

spiritual kinship with the famous outline of a hand with a line of red dots found in the prehistoric cave of Pech-Merle at Cabrerets in France . The dots are amazing. They pulse on the wall like the hearts of young embryos, naked to our eyes without a body to hide them. By means equally dramatic Betancourt involves us in a private ritual, aimed at something primordial and important, like the secret of life or the order of the world.

In the last few years, his work has .miraculously exfoliated, , taking him through changes of style and location. For instance, out of the soil of Loiza Aldea, famed

center for bomba dancing and other black traditions on the north coast of the island of Puerto Rico, Betancourt in 2002 fashioned myriad little sculptures and unified this series by painting them blue. Some of them read like fugitive pieces of jewelry, cut from turquoise.. As he experiments with these forms he gets bolder and bolder until finally he lets them set sail in boat-like compositions moored on the floor of gallery space [Plates 7 and 8] They recall the floor compositions by Jose

Bedia, in addition to works by Tony Cragg, the British sculptor and environment-maker. One [Plate 8] reads like a barge, laden with giant goblets, plates, and small vessels.

There is a great tradition of masks in Puerto Rico. Betancourt, who himself is Puerto Rican, plugs into that. There is a style of mask made from cocoanut shells, bristling with insertions of multiple horns. He played with this horned element until he got a sense of it: masking is hiding. Suddenly he was making his own kind of mask, binding strange forms to the front of the face, then photographing the result against fast-moving water and huge grayish stones. [plate 9]

All of the above serves as cultural preparation for Betancourt’s exciting new effort, The Enchanted Island, a fleeting exhibition of thousands of miniature towers made

from a combination of sand and glue. They are arranged in a solid grid across the floor of the gallery rooms. The whole installation will eventually be erased by the

artist. The ephemeral nature of these ritual forms match other fleeting forms, like his neo-Puerto Rican masks; gleaming pools of fuschia in white earth; and even what might be termed a self-Pieta, where his body is draped not on Mary but earth by the water.

. Note that in the last-mentioned composition he holds at his midriff a pilgrim’s white shell, a hint that he’s constantly moving, leaving behind impermanent traces on the road to new work..

Enchanted Island slows you down, like rumble-treads guarding a fast-lane toll exit.

. Their bristling texture, their obsessive repetiveness, , take and compel us. They are making things happen across time and space. We discover the artist, appropriately naked, before this rich earthwork. He sits like a shaman, surveying a song-line on the soil of Australia. [Plate 10] Art is his discipline: discovery of self through immersion in vision..

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Timba the Medicine: The Art of Carlos Betancourt:

by Robert Farris Thompson, dean of History of Art Yale University

Carlos Betancourt comes from the sea of the Creoles, the Caribbean, cradle of mambo, timba, and merengue, cradle of Lam and Mendieta and Bedia. The Caribbean method means to play remorselessly with the kinship of languages, mixing and bending, establishing meanings that cut many ways.

The Caribbean was a school of being for Carlos Betancourt. Here he acquired the taste for fine blending, in visual transmissions that are accurate and compelling. The more he mixes, the more you feel his mind.

It is said that the two largest bundles of neurons in the brain cluster in readiness for commands from the tongue and the hand. Speech and toll-making emerged in the work of the tongue and the hand. It is almost as if our paleolithic ancestors were celebrating the acquisition of words, plus the ability to hold and to make things, when, at the dawn of the image, they started painting on rock outlines of hands, and cut out of bone, and cut out of stone, man’s firstset of tools.

Betancourt resumes this celebration. His art is an amazing mix of primordial and contemporary. And the primordial, as the late and great Keith Haring reminds us, always makes us new.

Start in medias res with a recent elegant mixed-media painting of hands, signs, and color. The hands preside at left, right, and bottom center. These signs of presence surround a triangular area packed with signs carefully selected from Akan, Taino, and other traditionalist sources. The triangular outline distantly cites a three-point Taino object used to summon the ancestors.

Repeated white circles seal in the buzz of the signs. These icons of invocation are placed on a hushed field of mauve. Betancourt, speaking and drawing his own

personal creole, lives in the mixture of three or more languages. He brings off a painting that mixes delicate mauves with things quite intense. He honors the

cacique of his dreams and consciousness but does so unpretentiously. For there is a smile behind the learning, a sharing of hours, pouring over handbooks on

Drakensberg rock art and Akan adinkra and goldweights.

In one of his strongest works, a panoply of hands photographed in different places in this hemisphere—Teotiuacan, Miami, Cuba, Borinquen--there is a vague reminiscence of the site art of the seventies. But the play of the fingers is different with each hand, miming their sign-making powers. But they are not merely gesturing, caught in the act of signing and communicating. They also sense shapes set behind them, feeling with fingertips hardness, softness, reading in braille the places where once they were photographed and poised. So the ultimate code, in Betancourt hand imagery, is touch.

Betancourt culminates this painting with three hands in red, the ‘supreme presence of color’, as Levi-Strauss put it in a memorable passage in La Pensee

Sauvage. These hands take their power from paleolithic ochres. Perhaps this is Betancourt’s way of saying that he didn’t invent the outlined hand as presiding

icon, they did, the rock artists of the Drakensberg, the rock artist of the Franco-Cantabrian. But under their tutelage he took visual counsel, to signal to the future that we, too, were alive in the 20th century.

Betancourt, consistently primordial, also works with spirals, unfurling within them myriad little symbols, as ‘formulae of life’. Once, when he painted a wavy frieze of signs, and silhouetted them against a neon-like background, pulsing light blue, it was as if he had cut into coaxial cable, to study the flow of the ongoing images the way Soutine close-studied meats on the racks in Paris. Put another way, Betancourt, like many key artists, is trying to make sense of imagery-overload at the end of the 20th century. Putting the pieces together in caboclo-like fusion of Amerind and African, he dreams a dream of ultimate translation, going beyond transmission of words and into the real of pleasure, the realm of the shout and the moan.

A shout-economy governs his superb photo prints on back-lit paper, works from an aluminum light box. Now the signs are single, single bursts of visual noise, resting on primordial stone. The more he economizes, the more he intuits original contexts of rock gongs and yodels, the art history of ecstasy, ritual fusion with the fauna, the floral, and the mineral. Canvas turns stone, co-presences turn water or shadow. For instance, Betancourt light-projects one of his favorite self-elaborated emblems, a sign with a split bottom and a curved top, onto a stone covered with dark moss, resting by water. He paints that sign with light on the dark texture of the moss. Sign becomes shout. Meanwhile, the framing is Chinese in sobriety. The artist takes just the right amount of water, reading in its blueness as sky, and balances that against just the right sampling of stone.

In another strong work, again from the light box series, the split-bottom-curved-top sign rests on a rock and turns luminously red. Meanwhile backgrounds

vanish in the inkiest of shadows. The excerpt of rock is set against silence and emptiness in the two upper corners, in spiritual affinity with thecompositional genius of the Southern Sung masters.

Betancourt is clearly haunted by Ana Mendieta. ( There are traces of Bedia, as well ) But where Mendieta’s earthworks were grounded in palo gunpowder, fire , and concavity, he lives by other sources, San and Akan, especially an Akan motif, in the form of a fern, aya, meaning ‘I trust in God, I fear no man’.

And this is the power Betancourt once light-projected on a certain leaf. The sign of a fern becomes a medicine to our fears. At this point his art swerves into two African directions, one obviously Akan, the other less obviously in the direction of the Ejagham current in Atlantic art history. For the Ejagham, like the Mbuti of the Ituri Forest, are famous for writing on leaves ( an art picked up by the neighbors of the Ejagham on the Tikar Plain in Cameroon ). Ejagham and Ejagham-influenced artists also enclose graphic signs in leaf-like cartouches, with flowing stems to carry the eye from one point of meaning to another.

In Flash of the Spirit I illustrate a calabash incised by an Ejagham-influenced Ibibio artist at Ekeya, near the mouth of the Cross River, where one can clearly see leaf after leaf enclosing a galaxy of sparking signs of love and admiration. Writing on leaves came to the Caribbean and continued in Cuba.

And up it pops in the art of Betancourt. In this composition the stem divides the photo print in two. A leaf shoots sideways, into the right hand corner. Outlined by framing, we notice at once the leaf has become a slate, una pizarra de la selva. On that forest blackboard, Betancourt rewrites the maxim,‘I trust in God, I fear no one’, like a mantra for us all, as we go into the maelstrom of the millennium.