There are painters with immense facility whose works, seen on first viewing, invigorate us by their authority of pictorial means. Poussin and David come to mind. A certain restraint, a reining in of their abilities, multiplies the breadth of their achievement and our beguilement.

A painter such as Rembrandt, especially in his large work, engages us by the interplay of great technique acquired in a lifetime of intense and sincere search for a singular pictorial activity, one that illuminates a hidden but obvious world of feeling. Even when his technique seems crude, and there are many such passages in Rembrandt, I know of no other painter whose surfaces are encrusted with blobs and chunks accumulated in an awkward exploration for the appropriate description. There emanates from the work a vast sensation of intuition, mentation and corporeal pleasure that I call "the intelligence of the senses." It is this that quickens our lives and gives us a heightened sense of vitality, that which we call transcendence.

A certain style of virtuoso painting, what I would call "bravura" painting, activates this constellation of the senses all at once. Immediately, Frans Hals and John Singer Sargent come to mind. The activity of a brush, loaded with paint, pushed, pulled, dragged and rolled with virtuosic descriptive ease on the canvas, possesses a mesmerizing incantation of responses by its sheer audacity. It is after the initial enchantment, which can take a very long time to fade, that the virtuosity of the liberal and spontaneous gesture of the brush needs to ally itself to solidly formal description and meaningful correspondences of feeling.

Hals, certainly, and Sargent perhaps, when compared to a painter like Giovanni Boldini, maintain an integrity of means that gives them stature. Virtuosity cannot be taught. A good teacher can recognize its incipience and elicit it from the student. Though it is a rare occurrence, it has happened here in San Miguel de Allende.

The teacher, Jose Ignacio Maldonado, a man of great intelligence, sensitivity and perception, found Michelangelo Garrido in his classes. One morning, José Ignacio stopped me on the Ancha de San Antonio and insisted I look at the work of Michelangelo, his pupil. No one says "ow" like José Ignacio, and his inflections on this word need their own lexicon. This "ow" got me over to see the work of this 23-year-old painter originally from Mexico City.

A Faustian madness lies at the edge of all virtuosic work. I looked at the painting of Michelangelo Garrido as one looks at an ancient text recently deciphered into one's own tongue. The meaning of the text, no matter how ancient or arcane, has always existed since its inception. It is only from our tongue that it was hidden. The crags and blocks of paint, the assertion of the paint and its brushwork, take apart and reassemble the form in endless permutations of sensational pictorial. Every mark possesses a swift and audacious touch, elegant and dismembering at the same time. This adroit and cheeky brushwork has an authoritative insistence and emotive intensity beyond reason, beyond thought, visceral, and for all its audacity, incantatory.

One of the secrets of pictorial construction, tonality, when handled deftly, can hold an otherwise chaotic-seeming work together. In Garrido's work a gorgeous, sensible tonality pervades everywhere. Tonality can be learned, but it is always an intuitive activity. Where will this work go from here? This talent is capable of all and everything.


Art Opening, Paintings by Michelangelo Garrido
Friday, April 28, 5-7pm, Espacio Jean Vigo, Fábrica La Aurora

May Calendar of Events at Centro Cultural Ignacio Ramírez, El Nigromante (Bellas Artes)

Exhibit: FotoGuanajuato

Una vida con estilo (A Life with Style) By Tufic Yazbek Sala de Arte Mexicano Opening Friday, May 19, 7:30pm Free

Exhibit of drawings by Paula Balderas

Momento, movimiento Sala Principal Continuous through May 28 Free

San Miguel de Allende Third Puppet Festival 2006
April 29-May 7
Miguel Malo Auditorium





Permanent Exhibit: mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros
Vida y obra del Generalísimo 
Don Ignacio de Allende
Free



Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10am to 5:30pm, Sunday, 10am to 2pm Hernández Macías 75. For more information call 415-152-0289 / 152-0936 or email bellasartessma@hotmail.com