Confessions

Before starting to talk about my painting, I would like to say that the most important for an artist is to free his personality. Of course, this requires, as natural, a long and very worked process of depuration that means years and years of constant studies and intense work. If it is not so then we can "jump" and then our personality can be spoiled to fall in an imitative-transitory state that sometimes is permanents and that is the opposite of the path to follow. My art is basically abstract and travel by the metaphysic borders, changing to become a material-emotional synthesis. I try to reproduce the objects as static's subjects to the substance diversities that comes from them. In several successions, in appearance they present to our experience an intensive study to dig deeply in to the internal life of the objects that I try to express. With shapes and colors of my own experience, to personalize and get a reality ontological-universal that comes from the ethnic-social-psychological of our country and race.

Apparently without shape and not understandable, but only to those that aren't used to read the modern shapes. These feel different for not seeing the familiar shapes; shapes that belong top the classical-renaissance period.

In my painting there is no secrets. The clue is to make things in a way that only you and no other one can do them. In my case I use the common pigments in dust and sand, clay, special varnish, wax, water, forming what I call oil-temper-plastic. These experiences were started in 1955 and I have been perfecting them everyday to get the texture that is a characteristic of my work and that is example for several of my disciples and also to various Dominican painters. They have used methods and treatments similar in the use to these materials.

I don't like oil and I try to eliminate it or reduce it to a minimal coefficient, because it's well known that excess of this vehicle can cause severe headaches especially to the colorists. As all the materials are made for commercial purpose are uneducated. It happens with the common bases and I prefer to prepare them myself. I don not add oil and make painting with a fresh appearance.

I understand that every artist uses his own means and materials to his particular works in that way conditions better the dressing that biologically belong to him. In art is difficult to follow strange rules, is the artist that creates his own rules as integrated part of a good execution of his work.

In the country the climate is everyday more comfortable and our art is hatching new germs that very soon will have fruits in the plastic as transcendent values. Is very evident the struggle of our artist for surpassing and accomplishing inside the modern airs of art. This has located it as the head of the artistic movement in the country, even though it has not much time in the Dominican art. Has been only few years of it existence, because it was in 1942 when we started an official school to study art in the country. The merit is bigger if we consider that it is the most complicated of all the types of art. The painting has no limits, no bounds, no rules and it is a fruit mainly of the experience.

In painting you do not have prodigy children and Margarita Sarfalli expresses: "Painting doesn't have intuitive and direct expression means as dance and sound. Is not impelled by the need of communicate as the word, nor for the shelter and protection as architecture. It is far from the practical benefit, as the material realization. It is free and mystery, the most exclusive, elusive and inexplicable creation of the human spirit".

I started my 5th exposition on May 25th, 1962, at the Engineering and Architecture Faculty of the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo. Besides the oil-temper-plastic-painting, gouaches and drawings, I showed 40 ceramics. They were the first work realized in this aspect by a Dominican artist in the country.

I started my experiments by the year 1956, when I exposed at the modern art gallery inauguration, a "paneau" of tiles. My first works were realized on glazed tiles. I need to say that ceramic influenced very much my paintings. In my first exposition by 1953, I started doing some. As you can notice in my first tiles (1954-56) these are schematics drawings (some are colored) taking advantage of the white background of the gazed tiles. The white-grayed backgrounds that appeared later in my pictures are due to this influence. ("The Yaque flag", permanent gallery of Bellas Artes Palace in 1956). In ceramic I have realized several murals of a heroic size that have been collocated in several town halls of different provinces.

I love ceramic with passion, because I find its execution a primitive mystery strength that infiltrates through my vein and that motivates the spirit with frenzy of greedy thirst of creation, under the transformer and surprised fever of the magic of the fire. Miró was right when assured "Fire is the soul of ceramic".